Was Liz Truss denied a ‘realistic chance’ to succeed?

‘I assumed upon entering Downing Street that my mandate would be respected and accepted. How wrong I was.’ This is the crux of Liz Truss’s defence of her 49 days in Downing Street: the shortest-ever stint for a Prime Minister. It is also the start of her attempt at a political comeback.

Writing in today’s Sunday Telegraph, Truss gives us, for the first time, her account of things: 4,000 of her own words on ‘what happened’ last autumn and what she’s learned from it. Mistakes were made, she admits: in fact, they were all-but-guaranteed, she says, as she had ‘a vast amount to do and very little time in which to do it’. She repeats, as she did last year, that ‘communication could have been better.’ Truss is not ‘claiming to be blameless in what happened,’ though the details of what she most regrets are largely skirted over. But as she tells the story – from Boris Johnson’s resignation, all the way through to her own – it becomes very clear she places most of the blame elsewhere.