Where is Liz Truss? Our prime minister has gone missing

Where is the prime minister? Even new prime ministers often face unexpected crises in their first few days. Gordon Brown had a terrorist threat when someone tried to drive a car into the main doors of Glasgow airport, and he dealt with it calmly and well.

New prime ministers don’t usually face self-inflicted crises, it is true, but the reaction of the markets to Liz Truss’s emergency Budget on Friday is one of the most serious financial crises facing the country since Brown’s time. But all recent prime ministers have known that it is a core function of their job to speak to the nation at a time of crisis and explain how they are trying to deal with it.

We haven’t heard from Truss since she spoke in the graveyard slot at the United Nations, overnight, a week ago. She was in the House of Commons by Kwasi Kwarteng’s side as he announced his emergency Budget on Friday, supportively nodding and smiling, but she scuttled out of the chamber as soon as the leader of the opposition had responded.

Since then the markets have gone into meltdown. The chancellor was on television on Sunday, making things worse by saying that there would be more tax cuts soon – presumably also paid for by borrowing.

Then the government went into lockdown. Kwarteng was filmed by the BBC not answering questions as he left the Treasury to go the public way round to Downing Street. He put out a statement yesterday, at the same time as the Bank of England, in which he and Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank, sought to reassure the markets that government borrowing was under control.

Word seeped out from the No 10 bunker that even this limited public engagement was opposed by the prime minister, and that there was a disagreement – although “no raised voices”, according to the Financial Times – between her and her chancellor about the need for it.

It is hard to imagine any other prime minister reacting in this way. Tony Blair and David Cameron would have been in front of the nearest camera as soon as their exam-cramming minds had satisfied themselves that they had a line they could sell. They would have thought it was their job to take the nation into their confidence and reassure people directly that the government knew what it was doing. Brown, Theresa May and Boris Johnson would not have been so keen, but they would have recognised reluctantly that it was essential to their survival that they do so, possibly not quite so quickly.

Truss is a new prime minister, who has promised to do things differently. She is certainly delivering on that promise, and hiding from the people is her latest way of thumbing her nose at conventional wisdom.

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She and her chancellor seem supremely confident, as if they are sure that what they are doing is right and that the people will come to see this in time. The storm will blow over, the chancellor is reported to have said to his aides. But if they are right, normal politics would require them to go on television and explain why. Otherwise the field is left open to people who disagree with them – which is nearly everybody – to explain why they are mistaken. This is an especially acute problem when the nation’s entire body of political journalists is camped at the opposition party’s conference, at which Keir Starmer has a guaranteed platform.

Or perhaps she just doesn’t know what to say? Perhaps she has no idea what to do, or perhaps she cannot decide between two or three options that her advisers or the civil service have put to her. But there is a cost to not saying anything.

There is a reason all previous prime ministers addressed the public at times of crisis, even when it was difficult and they didn’t have all the facts at their disposal – if they don’t, it forces people to speculate about what is going on and to imagine that she is not up to the job or that she might be about to resign.