Can Truss repair the damage of her first four weeks?

Soon after being elected Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith summed up a test that he was soon to fail. ‘At the moment, I am a clean slate,’ he said. ‘It’s the next four months that count. If the wrong colours are applied to my slate, they will be there for ever. I have to be able to show in the first few months that my strengths are the dominant features, so that people will say, “That bloke looks as though he knows where he’s going.”’ William Hague, he said, never recovered from the baseball cap incidents. Early slips, he said, are fatal.

Three or four months is a luxurious timetable. In an era where social media is Britain’s No. 1 source of written news, the whole process is accelerated. The great fear stalking the Tory party now is that, after three of four weeks, Liz Truss’s position is already unrecoverable.