Liz Truss’s well-scripted first PMQs

Liz Truss’s first Prime Minister’s Questions was well-scripted, both for the new Tory leader and Keir Starmer. They had come along planning to talk about the cost of living crisis: Truss so that she could reassure the public (and her own party) that ‘immediate action to help people with their bills’ was on the way, and Starmer to probe her on how she was going to pay for it. The exchanges worked for both of them this time around.

Because Truss is going for an energy price freeze – proposed by Labour – Starmer had to move his attack from ‘what are you going to do’ to ‘how are you going to do it’. He told the Chamber that the ‘real choice, the political choice, is who is going to pay’ and that Truss’s refusal to contemplate a windfall tax would ‘make working people pay’ while leaving the excess profits of the energy companies ‘on the table’.