'She Is Not Hiding Under A Desk' The Day Power Drained From PM

When it was announced that Penny Mordaunt had offered to stand in for Liz Truss in response to an urgent Commons question over the economic crisis yesterday, some Conservative MPs thought it was a joke.

- Pippa Crerar Aubrey Allegretti

“Why is she asking one of her biggest rivals for the job to take her place? She’II totally show her up,” one said. It was hard to see the cabinet minister’s performance as anything other than an audition for the top job.

Mordaunt did little to dispel that impression as she landed punchy attacks on the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, roused the depressed Tory troops and offered an apology to the country for the instability caused by the PM’s dramatic climb down. Truss had done none of these things publicly, though probably should have.

Nevertheless, it was Truss’s refusal to show up herself that most riled MPs. Mordaunt repeatedly assured them there was a genuine reason” why she was not there. In one particularly bizarre exchange, she insisted: The prime minister is not under a desk.”

But where was she? Truss was, the Guardian revealed, holed up with Sir Graham Brady, the powerful chair of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs, in her Commons office. Downing Street sources claimed it was a planned meeting, rather than crisis talks, but conceded it was inevitable her fragile position would have come up. Truss’s decline from shiny new PM to being in office but very much not in power has been a sorry story of misjudgments, blinding ideology and inexperience. But the last 24 hours have underlined how weak she is.

When they met at Chequers on Sunday lunchtime for a three hour meeting, her new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt now the most powerful man in the government was clear. If she wanted to avoid an economic crisis and restore any shred of Tory competence, Trussonomics had to be junked.

In the privacy of the mansion, with just their closest aides around them, Hunt went through what was left of the mini-budget line by line. The 1p cut in the basic rate of income tax would have to go, he told her, and the energy support package would have to be substantially scaled back.