Even her harshest critics would admit her first two weeks in the job had been tough.
Day one - Liz Truss becomes Conservative leader, effectively toppling Boris Johnson less than three years after he won the Tories’ biggest majority since 1987.
Day two - she flies to Balmoral Castle for an audience with the Queen where the monarch, in what turned out to be her last duty in life, asks Ms Truss to form a government and become her 15th PM.
Day three - she faces Labour leader Keir Starmer at her Prime Minister’s Questions debut.
Day four - Britain’s longest reigning monarch Queen Elizabeth II dies after 70 years on the throne, and Ms Truss must find the right words to address a grief-stricken nation and pay tribute to Her Majesty.
Fast forward to day 14 of her Tory leadership and Ms Truss is sitting in seat 11B of an Airbus A321-253NX cruising at 506mph and 36,000ft, flying to New York for the United Nations General Assembly.
Inside the cabin of the jet, she is ready for her first grilling from the media as PM.
It has been a long day already: as well as her daily security briefing, she has attended the Queen’s funeral at Westminster Abbey - where she read a bible lesson from the Gospel of John - and the burial service at St George’s Chapel, Windsor.
From there, her Range Rover she was blue-lighted in a police motorcade around the M25 and up the M11 to Stansted Airport where the Titan Airways chartered jet - emblazoned with the words “United Kingdom” and with its tailfin sprayed in the colours of the Union Flag - was fuelled and waiting, packed with No10 aides, civil servants and journalists.
Less than an hour after take off, she made her way from the front of the aircraft to the middle where the travelling media pack was waiting to pounce.
A reporter mentioned to the PM the ordeal that awaited.
“It’s what I wanted,” she joked. “Shall I sit here, in the hot seat?”
As she took her seat alongside her official spokesman, one reporter dropped her phone and, inches away from the PM, exclaimed: “Oh s***!”
The Premier didn’t flinch.
Still clad entirely in funereal black with her nails painted with caramel-coloured varnish, Ms Truss spent the next 32 minutes fielding questions on subjects ranging from bankers’ bonuses (she’s axing the cap) to energy prices (average family bills will not top £2,500) and from her reaction to the Queen’s death (shock) to whether the UK would defend Taiwan with force if China invaded (unclear).
Apart from gently fiddling with her fingers as flight KRH645 flew westwards, she betrayed little sign she was ill at ease, speaking slowly and giving considered - if surprising - answers.
Aides were quick to comment on the contrast with her predecessor’s bombastic bluster.
During the journey, passengers tucked into a mozzarella, sun-dried tomatoes and rocket salad, followed by roast chicken, roast potatoes and Mediterranean vegetables, with chocolate cake for dessert.
The meal was washed down with 12.5% Spanish Merlot and 11.5% French Sauvignon Blanc.
Some 3,462 miles, seven hours and 35 minutes after take off, the PM’s plane touched down at JFK Airport before she was whisked away in a convoy straight off the Tarmac to her hotel.
The next 48 hours unfolded in a diplomatic whirlwind.
She held formal talks - “bilats”, in political jargon - with nine world leaders: French President Emmanuel Macron, Japanese PM Fumio Kishida, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Lithuanian leader Gitanas Nauseda, Mauritian PM Pravind Jugnauth, US President Joe Biden, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez and Israel’s PM Yair Lapid.
On Tuesday morning, following a 6am run in Central Park with her bodyguards, she granted five sit-down interviews with broadcasters from BBC, ITV, Sky News, Channel 5 and TalkTV.
The sessions took place on the 102nd floor of the Empire State building where she joked with journalists about the drop down.
In the late afternoon, she and Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska visited a grim exhibition at the Ukrainian Institute of America detailing Russian war crimes.
Curators studied 6,683 images before selecting 22 to show at the display, which has also been shown at NATO headquarters and the European Parliament in Brussels.
Looking at the horrific pictures, a clearly moved Ms Truss said: "These are the type of crimes we thought had been consigned to history.”
On Wednesday morning, she hosted 15 business leaders, including executives from Google, Boeing and Microsoft, for a roundtable session on “economic recovery and growth”.
Meanwhile, aides were hastily re-writing her address to the UN General Assembly due for 9pm that evening.
Overnight, Vladimir Putin had called up Russian reservists to bolster the Kremlin’s flagging war in Ukraine - and threatened to use nuclear weapons.
Ms Truss’s speech had been “nailed down”, according to one Downing Street official.
But the Moscow dictator’s latest rant forced No10 to insert new passages while the PM flitted from meeting to meeting.
While she spent almost a year as Foreign Secretary, jetting around the world from summit to summit, as PM she faced an even more gruelling schedule during the brief trip to New York.
The short visit passed off without any embarrassing incidents for the PM - helped by her dodging key issues in formal negotiations.
When she met President Macron, for example, the pair avoided the thorny issue of Channel migrants - despite her telling the Mirror on the flight out: “I want to have a constructive relationship with France, of course that means working together on the issue of migration” - and the trickier still subject of the Northern Ireland Protocol.
As her plane landed back at Stansted this morning, No10 were judging this first trip for the new PM a success - and hope for a boost in the polls as she prepares to travel to Birmingham for the Conservative Party conference next weekend.
