Liz Truss to face crucial PMQs amid warnings pensioners could lose £442 a year if triple lock abandoned – politics live

Good morning. PMQs is often dismissed a pointless pantomime, but one function it performs well is to serve as a barometer of political authority. A PM or opposition leader who crumbles at the dispatch box is not going to survive for long (being hopeless at PMQs was a major factor behind the Tories’ decision to dump Iain Duncan Smith as their leader in 2003) and that is why today’s session will be a make-or-break one for Liz Truss.

It is only her third PMQs since becoming prime minister, but it will be the first time she has faced the Commons since sacking her chancellor (for implementing policies including one she reportedly forced him to announce despite his reservations), dumping almost all the measures in her mini-budget, and abandoning the two-year energy price guarantee that, until Monday, was the one policy she was still claiming credit for. The word “humiliating” is overused in political reporting, but it is barely adequate to describe quite how damaging the events of the past week have been to Truss’s reputation.

Today she has got to persuade her MPs that, somehow, she can pick herself up and carry on. An adequate or good performance is unlikely to help her much, on its own, in the long term. But a disaster could accelerate moves to get rid of her.

As for what is happening on that front, no one is entirely sure. Tory MPs are mostly agreed that at some point she will go, and that the parliamentary party needs to settle on a replacement without giving party members a vote, but at the moment there is no consensus on who that person should be. The most powerful figure in this process is Sir Graham Brady who, as chair of the 1922 Committee, has the job of knowing what MPs think, and conveying their collective view to the PM. He does it very well. But he is also remarkably discreet, and journalists do not have a clear idea as to what he is up to.

Here is our overnight story on the Tory plotting.

Related: Dismayed Tory MPs continue to plot to oust Liz Truss from No 10

As if Truss’s problems were not bad enough, she also faces a growing Tory revolt over her refusal to commit to maintaining the pensions triple lock. With figures out this morning showing inflation running at 10.1% in September, this is the amount by which pensions should rise from April next year if the government maintains the triple lock, as Truss was promising only two weeks ago. But this week No 10 has floated the possibility that it may be suspended.

Sir Steve Webb, a former Lib Dem pensions minister, said this morning if the state pension goes up in line with inflation, it will rise from £185.15 a week to £203.85.

But if the triple lock does not apply, and pensions rise by 5.5%, in line with earnings, the weekly new state pension would be around £8.50 a week lower than this, adding up to an annual loss of £442, he said.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the transport secretary, gives evidence to the Commons Treasury committee.

12pm: Liz Truss faces Keir Starmer at PMQs.

After 12.45pm: MPs debate a Labour motion criticising the government’s handling of the mini-budget, and calling for the publication of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s economic forecast immediately.

3pm: Sir Jon Cunliffe, the Bank of Englands’s deputy governor for financial stability, gives evidence to the Commons Treasury committee on what the committee calls “autumn 2022 fiscal events”.

Around 4pm: MPs debate a Labour motion saying time should be set aside in parliament on 29 November so that the Commons can pass a bill to ban fracking.

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