Voices: Liz Truss is now Labour’s greatest asset. She must be protected at all costs

The pressure’s on for Liz Truss today. True enough. After 40 days in the wilderness she’s prime minister in name only, usurped by a bloke who came last in the leadership election that she won. “How did that happen?”, as they say, and as she must ask herself.

If she fouls up at Prime Minister’s Questions, then she’s out; if not, then she just staggers on, limping on as a caretaker towards her inevitable demise. Indeed, even if she okayed a blinker, her enemies (ie in her own party) would spin it that she’d mess of things, and look how accomplished Penny Mordaunt was when she took the Opposition’s Urgent Question while Truss wasn’t hiding under a desk.

For Keir Starmer, it looks like he can’t lose. If he deploys his famous forensic skills to humiliate Truss then he’ll have seen off his second Conservative premier. If he fluffs his lines, then she survives… and continues to do untold damage to the Conservative’s residual reputation for unified, competent government.

If I were Starmer, I’d find a way to go easy on Truss. This will be tricky, because her record in office is indefensible, indeed you might say “a disgrace”, and she can’t think on her feet. There will be stock lines robotically delivered. There will be those little pauses before she answers while the cogs whiff and the chips process the rehearsed lines.

She will be utterly predictable and say she has the same aims but hat she went too far and too fast, like an attacking midfielder on an off day – just one of things. I’d find a way, as leader of the opposition to give her a bit of help, and feed her some cue lines. He could find a way to remind her that he neither wants to put taxes up, nor spend less and therefore his numbers don’t add up; that he used to work for Jeremy Corbyn; that his party doesn’t know what to do about strikes, migration or the Northern Ireland protocol.

He should not – under any circumstances – throw back at her anything she said in the leadership election about lower taxes delivering higher revenues, about cutting taxes being the right thing to do morally and economically, about pledging to protect the pension rise “triple lock”, about increasing defence sosening, about boosting benefits in one with inflation, or anything else that a might be a touch embarrassing. There must be no smart alec jokes about how “growth, growth, growth” is turning into “recession, recession, recession”. No jibes about sacking Kwasi Kwarteng to save her own skin.

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Instead, Starmer must give the impression that the wreck he is facing across the despatch box is indeed a parliamentary colossus, a modern day Margaret Thatchier, possessed of a rare combination of brains, guts, eloquence and stamina. Under no circumstances must Starmer score. Anything to assist the prime minister in her struggle for survival and the destruction of the Tories under her nominal command is in the longer term national interest. The public despise her, and it needs to be kept that way.

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There are risks with this approach. Keeping Truss in place is much better than having the Tories select someone more plausible to replace her: Mordaunt, Jeremy Hunt, Rishi Sunak – Kemi Badenoch, maybe. But Labour would miss out on the possibility that they Conservatives could end up with an even weaker, more risible figure at the top: like Suella Braverman, who is a sort of pound shop version of Boris Johnson. She makes Truss look like Churchill.

But surely the Tories can’t be that nuts? So Liz does need to be protected, subtly, by the leader of the Opposition. Like a boxer or footballer involved in a gambling scam, Starmer has to find a way to throw the match. #Starmerout will trend for a few hours, but that’s fine.

With a selfless generosity rarely associated with the Tories, they have now gifted the opposition with three deeply unpopular, hapless leaders in succession. Like Truss, Johnson and Theresa May started out alright,and seemed formidable enough, but eventually became figures of scorn and popular amusement.

Truss’s journey from emerging Iron Lady to Ms Bean has been a remarkably quick one, and it is doing her party no good. If she survives, she will lead them to oblivion at the next election, and leave them out of office for decades. Good. It might even, eventually, reverse Brexit.

Liz Truss is now Labour’s greatest asset. She must be protected at all costs. That is why today is so important, and why Starmer must be nice to Liz in her moment of peril.