Liz Truss had barely finished speaking when the ripples began spreading around the chamber. Notes were ferried along frontbenches; brows furrowed, faces paled and Keir Starmer quietly slipped out. It swiftly emerged that family members were being summoned to the bedside of the 96-year-old Queen, so visibly fragile just a few days ago as she anointed her third female prime minister.
What a sombre, black-edged week for a new prime minister to make her debut, and not just because of darkening skies over Balmoral. The energy plan Liz Truss was unveiling when the news broke of the monarch’s failing health essentially involves writing a blank cheque for multiple billions for the next two years, to cover the costs of something she cannot easily predict or control. It is an extraordinary gamble with particularly serious consequences for the poor, for the public finances and for the planet. If it blows up in all our faces, it’s hard to see her government recovering.
