Liz Truss apologises for the chaos. What next?

Finally, we hear from the Prime Minister. Liz Truss has given an interview to the BBC's political editor Chris Mason. It comes at the end of a day in which she was accused of 'hiding under a desk' and emerged in the Commons only for a silent half an hour of blinking occasionally. She apologised, saying: 'Firstly I want to accept responsibility and say sorry, for the mistakes that have been made.'

The Prime Minister has left others to argue that the government is still functioning. What she hasn't done, until now, is offer any argument about why she should remain in office when Jeremy Hunt is effectively in power. That argument now seems to be that she is still focused on her priorities, including energy supplies and new roads. She then insisted that she still believed in 'a low tax, high growth economy', but because of the 'very difficult circumstances at the moment', things had to change. The reason she got up in the morning, she said, was because she wanted the country to be a 'better place'. She had expected it to be tough, and it had been tough.

Truss did not appear comfortable this evening. It would have been weird if she did, frankly, given this has been an historically bad start – and possibly quite soon end – to her premiership. When asked about her future, she said without much conviction that she would be leading the Tories into the next election. When Mason probed her on this, she deflected by saying she didn't want to focus on the 'internal discussions in the Conservative party'. The problem is, of course, that the Conservative party will decide whether she has to, not the Prime Minister.