It’s over, isn’t it? Summoned to Parliament on Monday afternoon to discuss the sacking of her Chancellor, the Prime Minister, who is definitely not under house arrest, declined to turn up. 

Instead we got Penny Mordaunt, a leadership rival who has been reported as plotting to replace her. For Liz Truss to send her was an admission of defeat on its own. Labour, reasonably enough, claimed the Prime Minister was “frit”, but Truss doesn’t need to fear any of the opposition parties. It is the Conservative Party that ends the careers of Conservative leaders. The last thing you want to do at a moment such as this is give Tory MPs sight of a better alternative leader.

We had already had one of these in the morning, when Jeremy Hunt made it very clear that, even if the Prime Minister wasn’t actually tied up in a Downing Street cellar, she might as well be. In a brief televised statement, he had gutted almost every part of Truss’s economic programme. He had also, and he surely knew it, shown Conservatives that he was someone who could look steady under fire and reassure the all-powerful bond market. He would do it again in Parliament when Mordaunt had finished her run.

If Hunt’s long suit is “plausible son-in-law”, Mordaunt’s is “whiff of exciting danger”. She knew that this could be a moment where the understudy steps up into the big job, and she wasn’t going to let it go. “The Prime Minister is detained on urgent business,” she began, to a gale of laughter from the opposition, “they will have to make do with me.”

Labour leader Keir Starmer had fun at Truss’s expense. “Under this Tory government, everybody gets to be Prime Minister for 15 minutes,” he joked. “The lady’s not for turning … up.” 

Mordaunt’s reply was interesting. “I’m quietly confident that the leader of the opposition will not have his 15 minutes,” she began. Starmer laughed at that, gestured to her and said something that was inaudible in the press gallery, possibly suggesting she fancied her own chances. Mordaunt looked back at him and her eyebrows twitched. Perhaps, she seemed to be saying, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. 

Her defence of Truss, such as it was, was that we didn’t appreciate the Prime Minister’s bravery in sacking her Chancellor in an attempt to save her own job. “It took courage to do it,” Mordaunt said. Was she mocking Truss? “I fully appreciate the optics of me appearing at the despatch box,” she said at one point. It all felt a little arch.

It was just like old times

If Conservative MPs were wishing they could have good old utterly shameless Boris Johnson back, Mordaunt wanted to show them that she could do his thing, too. She accused Starmer of delaying the serious business of government with his trivial questions about why the Prime Minister had sacked the Chancellor. She said he wanted to stop Brexit and make Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister. It was just like old times. 

But was her real target elsewhere? When Labour’s Stella Creasy asked if Truss was in hiding, Mordaunt got her moment to deliver a soundbite for the ages. “The Prime Minister is not under a desk,” she said, to opposition delight. It was either an appalling slip or a deliberate slight. 

Mordaunt hinted a number of times that there was some vitally important reason of national security that was keeping the Prime Minister from the chamber. Briefly we wondered whether Truss had decided that Kyiv was a safer place to be than London. But later we learned she was meeting Sir Graham Brady, who as chairman of the 1922 Committee has played gatekeeper to the political afterlife for a record number of prime ministers.

And then we saw Truss herself. She strode into the House as Mordaunt was coming to the end of her statement, her smile fixed. She sat there as Hunt denounced her approach to fiscal responsibility and said he now faced “decisions of eye-watering difficulty”. She was strangely immobile, still smiling determinedly, looking neither left nor right, as though she were posing for a Victorian photographer, her constant blinking the only sign of animation. 

What was she thinking? Does she believe she can turn this around? Is she in shock at just how badly everything has gone? When she heard how Tory MPs lapped up Mordaunt, how they praised Hunt, did she realise she was finished? Who knows. 

And then she left, doubtless for more vitally important government business. Or perhaps to clear her desk.