PMQs: Did Liz Truss just overrule Jeremy Hunt?

Prime Minister's Questions was not an easy ride for Liz Truss. Nor was it catastrophic. As James predicted earlier, crunch moments rarely end up being as crunchy as expected. The Prime Minister turned up with some well-prepared defensive lines (also something James predicted), including, curiously, ‘I'm a fighter, not a quitter’. It wasn't clear what particularly appealed to her about that famous line from Peter Mandelson’s victory speech when he held onto his Hartlepool seat in 2001 after being forced out of the government earlier that year. Not least because Mandelson had to quit the government a second time.

Anyway, Keir Starmer started the exchanges with a joke about the biography of Truss that's being penned by Harry Cole and our very own James Heale, asking whether the promise that it would be ‘out by Christmas’ related to the book's publication or to Truss's longevity as Prime Minister. Truss insisted – to roars and jeers from the opposition – that she had been ‘very, very clear’ that she was ‘sorry’ and that ‘I have made mistakes’. 

Still more curiously than her Mandelson line, she chose to stick to boasting about the ‘energy price guarantee’, even though one of the many U-turns that the Chancellor executed on Monday involved dropping the pledge to keep that going for two years and limiting it to the same six months proposed by Labour. Mentioning it at all highlighted that within a week, Truss had gone from boasting to the chamber that her government was being more generous than the opposition, to merely stating that she was continuing with at least one policy, albeit in a rather less ambitious manner than before. Starmer led his MPs in a chant listing all the policies that had ‘gone!’ to good effect, before asking ‘why is she still here?’ That was when the fighter line popped up.

The fight between Starmer and Truss was also curious because it involved the line ‘they crashed the economy’. We have grown used to hearing this claim made by Conservatives talking about the Labour party over the past decade. Now it is the Labour attack on the Tories. When Truss used a very George Osborne-esque line that ‘he backs strikers, we back the strivers’, Starmer retorted that ‘she's asking me questions because we're a government in waiting, they're an opposition in waiting’.

It was indeed very difficult to see much evidence that the Tories are really governing today. Truss told the Commons that ‘I've been clear we are protecting the triple lock,’ which was very much at odds with what her spokesman said yesterday about not committing to anything, and with the similar noises Jeremy Hunt made in the Commons on Monday. It was also at odds with what Foreign Secretary James Cleverly was saying on GB News almost simultaneously: he said that it ‘wouldn’t be right for me to pre-announce or speculate about any of the things that the Chancellor might put in his statement’. Could it be that Liz Truss has just overruled her Chancellor? Or has she just made another confident assertion about something that will nevertheless not happen?

The one crumb of comfort for the Prime Minister will be that she didn’t face open attacks from her backbenchers. But this isn’t because they are comfortable with her remaining. It’s just that they know now isn’t the time to start marching troops up the hill before a proper replacement plan has been nailed down. The drama wasn’t in today's PMQs, but it's not far away.