Liz Truss did enough to get through the day. That is a low hurdle, to be sure, but it was not a given. Anyone who watched her press conference on Friday, when she scarpered after taking just four questions, looking weak and broken, will have wondered whether she was up to coping with the extraordinary pressure that her multiple U-turns have placed her under. But today she sounded confident and combative. A disastrous performance might have triggered an immediate leadership challenge, but she was better than that, and so for the next few hours at least she is probably safe. It helped that she had something to announce. On Monday, Jeremy Hunt, the new chancellor, indicated that the government was considering shelving the triple lock on pensions. No 10 confirmed this on Tuesday, and James Cleverly was using the same line on Wednesday morning. Now Truss has confirmed that the triple lock will stay. This meant at least she was on the front foot at one point, and the failure by the SNP’s Ian Blackford to grasp what he was being told also allowed her to deliver a competent put-down, which helped make her PMQs look OK. Of course, the triple lock announcement amounts to another U-turn. And we do not know yet whether it was cleared with Hunt in advance. But, given the state of opinion in the party (and in the Tory media), it was probably inevitable.
None of this, though, changes the fundamentals. Truss is a PM shorn of all credibility, who has had to abandon almost all the policies she was defending even a week ago and who is now being propped up by her chancellor. Keir Starmer made these points very effectively, with questions that were much pithier than usual. Here are three of them. A book is being written about the prime minister’s time in office. Apparently it’s going to be out by Christmas. Is that the release date or the title? Last week the prime minister stood there and promised absolutely no spending reductions, they all cheered. This week the chancellor announced a new wave of cuts. What’s point of a prime minister whose promises don’t even last a week? Economic credibility – gone. And her supposed best friend the former chancellor, he’s gone as well. They’re all gone. So why is she still here? Starmer did not leave Truss in a puddle on the floor. But the longer she stays in No 10, the better for Labour, and so strategically Starmer got the ideal result.
Truss’s main response was to accuse Labour of being in favour of militant trade unionism (a non-sequitur, in the current circumstances), and to quote Peter Mandelson, saying “I’m a fighter, not a quitter”. She may have been reminded of the line by Mandelson himself, who wrote in the Spectator two weeks ago about how it was time for Kwasi Kwarteng to show whether he was a fighter or a quitter. Normally when politicians quote this line they are trying to make some Mandelson-related comparison. But it sounded as if Truss were using it just because she could not think of any other way of saying that she would not be resigning. Perhaps she ought to have studied the context more closely. Mandelson used the phrase when he had already resigned as a minister. And he deployed it at an election count, after he won. Truss looks like someone whose resignation is yet to come, and who won’t be celebrating anything much at the time of the next election.