If this was Liz Truss’s attempt to save herself, she’ll be gone by morning

Three weeks ago, the prime minister couldn’t open her mouth without tanking the currency yet further. Now she can’t open her mouth without everyone merely pissing themselves laughing, so things are clearly improving.

This had been breathlessly built up as a “big” Prime Minister’s Questions. Such talk is quite silly. It’s only a bit of pantomime and it never changes anything. She’s not on trial, not least as the verdict has already been delivered. She’s just waiting for sentencing now and, if she was sensible, which she isn’t, would be keen for it to be all over as quickly as possible, which it still might be but no one really seems to want to pull the lever.

But one thing she did have to do was try and convince her own MPs to stick with her for a bit longer and hope things might improve – which she didn’t and they won’t.

The prime minister’s newest strategy, when faced with yet more evidence of everything she’s done wrong and how much it has harmed everyone, is to point out that she has apologised, as if what people expect from their leaders is for them to be sorry for the pain they’ve heaped upon them.

Somewhat worryingly, when Keir Starmer asked Truss about a forthcoming biography of her, and whether “out by Christmas” is the title or the release date, the howls of laughter were less loud for the question than the answer.

“I have been very clear,” she replied, already well into her now customary nervous tic of holding out her right arm as if signalling a wide. “I have been very clear that I am sorry, and I have made mistakes but the right thing to do in those circumstances is...”

“RESIGN!” Everyone in the room thought it and at least 200 people shouted it. Whatever it was she actually said, no one heard and it would only have been forgotten anyway. As it happens, while she was speaking, one of her special advisers was being suspended and investigated for anonymously briefing rude and vitriolic comments about former cabinet ministers. It hardly needs stating that that sort of thing doesn’t help when you’re already clinging on for dear life. It may also warrant stating that one of the person in question’s more recent jobs was giving comms advice to Prince Andrew.

By her side sat her brand new chancellor. By somewhat unfortunate coincidence, he did one of those light-hearted interviews with The Times about his favourite books and films, which was published this morning but one suspects conducted a little while ago.

“My favourite play is King Lear,” it breezily states. “No one is flawless and to see the greatest of people brought down so grindingly by pride or mistakes is moving and not just because I have seen it happen to five prime ministers in my time in office.”

Make that six, Jeremy. His face remained admirably expressionless throughout, becoming tense only at one rather important moment, when he heard the prime minister announce she was “absolutely committed to the pensions triple lock”. This is a commitment he has pointedly refused to give himself, and nor has the prime minister’s spokesperson. So it seems possible, if not probable, that the prime minister was just saying whatever words she felt like to make the problem go away, which it won’t.

Keir Starmer also pointed out that a week ago, no matter what he had asked her, she had replied by criticising Labour’s plan to only offer support on energy bills until next April, rather than April 2024. And here they were, a week later, with that now being the government’s plan.

“We are being honest,” she said. “We’re levelling with the public.” But the public really don’t feel like they’re being levelled with. Just levelled.

All of these comebacks were met with deafening silence. Not so long ago, PMQs became entirely painful to watch, as Jeremy Corbyn’s own MPs sat behind him making no sound at all, while he went carried on going through the motions of a leadership that was walking around dead on its feet, and that’s exactly what’s happening here.

It’s funny, of course it is, but it’s unsettling too. The crucial dramatic point of any sitcom has to be that the protagonist can’t escape the situation they’re in, though they in some form or other would like to, be it the Wernham Hogg offices or a Peckham high rise. (This time next year, Rodders, we’ll be millionaires.)

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Liz Truss is trapped only by herself. She could walk out any second, but she can’t. The repeated question – what is the point of her? – now that everything she wants to do with power has been taken off her, overstates her zealotry. The only thing she really wants is to be prime minister. Everything else comes a very distant second. (In 2016, her passion for Brexit did not extend far enough to risk losing and being on the wrong side of David Cameron. She likes to think of herself as a firebrand, but in this crucial regard, and indeed every regard, she is a lot less fiery than Rishi Sunak, though she’s too deluded by her own grandeur to see it.)

At one point, one of her backbenchers turned to another and whispered, very loudly, “useless”. This was while she found herself shouting old Peter Mandelson slogans about being “a fighter not a quitter”. This, for the record, refers to Mandelson winning re-election in Hartlepool in 2001 despite various scandals. It’s quite a big leap from there to carrying on as prime minister despite having set fire to absolutely all of her political and intellectual credibility.

She is indeed useless. Her only remaining use is to sit there while her MPs work out how to get rid of her, most of the usual methods now being off limits, because they’ve done it so badly. But they will work it out eventually, and that will be that. It will then be somebody else’s turn to be ritualistically humiliated, and the very best they can hope for is that it won’t be quite as bad as this.