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.