“What she needs are people who recognise that she is a brilliant woman and want to give her understanding, which is completely different from giving her a set of facts. She doesn’t need someone who is going to hand her an atlas and say: ‘Memorise every capital city and spit it back at me.’ What she needs is someone who is willing to work with her so she develops her own understanding of these things, that it becomes Sarah Palin’s ideas, owned by Sarah Palin. It requires someone who respects Sarah Palin’s intelligence.”