THERE SA May’s complacent, condescending stonewalling in the face of Andrew Marr’s persistent questions about the reported failed Trident test was really not what people wanted to hear yesterday.

Four times in quick succession, the Prime Minister declined to say whether she had been aware of the incident when she addressed the House of Commons last July on the renewal of Britain’s nuclear deterrent. An authoritative report said an unarmed Trident II D5 missile had veered in the wrong direction towards the US coastline when it was launched from a British submarine, HMS Vengeance, off Florida, last June.

The report suggested that the “disastrous failure” had stirred panic in Downing Street; Number 10 was greatly concerned that the incident would harm the essential credibility of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, and thus a cover-up was put into place.

Marr was doing his job when he asked Mrs May whether she knew of the incident at the time of her speech. Four times she saw fit to dodge the question, reaching instead for lazy platitudes and a passing dig or two at Jeremy Corbyn. Marr persisted but knew that the Prime Minister had no intention of giving him an honest answer. The most she said was that tests take place regularly to test our nuclear deterrence, but of course this is something that voters already know.

This issue matters. Nuclear deterrence is a profoundly serious issue. MPs voted last summer to spend around £40 billion on replacing Trident, having absorbed Mrs May’s assertion that she would be willing to authorise a nuclear strike that could mean the deaths of 100,000 people. For her to so brazenly decline now to acknowledge the failed test, seven months after it happened, belittles the voters, undermines notions of trust, and mocks government pretence at openness. What would it have hurt her to say that the failed test was but a one-off glitch and that Trident is safe and reliable? Instead, Labour and the SNP are now demanding a full investigation into the test. The SNP’s defence spokesman, Brendan O’Hara MP, believes that if the Government hushed up safety concerns it would amount to a “sickening betrayal”.

The conviction that Mrs May has miscalculated was strengthened by the intervention of Admiral Lord West, former First Sea Lord and chief of the Naval Staff for four years. “What I am shocked by is why the Government didn’t come clean about it,” he said yesterday. “If a firing goes wrong, you should say that it has gone wrong, unless you think there’s something that means that it’s so fundamentally wrong that the whole system is no longer viable”. Failing to tell the people what happened carried a whiff of the old Soviet Union, or of North Korea or China, “where they won’t admit to things going wrong when you’re actually testing them to see if they do or don’t go wrong”.

With an unpredictable, thin-skinned character now in the White House, and global tensions rising as a result, Mrs May could have done us a small service by being open about the failed Trident test. Disappointingly she chose, instead, to rely on patronising evasion.