A party resigned to oblivion made for a sulky session that did Rishi Sunak and the Commons no favours

There’s something to be said for a prolonged death. It means you can get your grieving in when the patient is still alive. All the more important when that patient is you. The Tories have known the game is up for some time now. They can read the polls as well as the rest of us. They are facing electoral wipeout. It’s not totally out the question that they might even be the third largest party after the next election.

None of this comes easy for Tories, born to believe that they are the party of government. So there has been plenty of tears as they process their grief. First the denial. This can’t be happening, they told themselves. These things don’t happen to people like them. It is against the natural order. So they dictated their own reality. One of their choosing. The methodology of the polls was wrong. Of course it was.

The former PM’s account of her time in office is unstoppably self-serving, petulant, and politically jejune

“They didn’t seem to understand,” writes Liz Truss on page 250 of this unstoppably self-serving reworking of Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, “that the UK was heading towards an economic cliff and that I was seeking to conduct a handbrake turn to avoid driving off the edge.” The scene is Birmingham, 30 September 2022, just before the self-described Brian Clough of prime ministers gave her keynote address to what turned out to be a divertingly catastrophic Conservative party conference.

The then prime minister is livid about how a cabal of Cinos (pronounced “Chinos” – Conservatives in name only) and other blob-adjacent political invertebrates were trying to nobble the week-old mini-budget she devised with her chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng. By means of this reform, a new globally competitive post-Brexit Britain would emerge. This “unchained Britannia” would be unconstrained by planning regulations, free to frack as never before and able to explore the North Sea for oil despite the ululations of virtue-signalling eco-zealots and the rest of the anti-growth wokerati. This would be a Britain where the super-rich were less hamstrung by corporation or inheritance taxes, and in which the 45p income tax rate (what she calls here the “anti-success tax”) would be little more than a bad memory.

Sunak likes to pretend his predecessor never happened. But are the moderates going to sit back and cede their party to fanatics?

It would be charitable to ignore Liz Truss. Attention is her addiction and any dose, even laced with scorn, sustains the toxic belief that she has important things to say. Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister has been bingeing on publicity for a memoir that cannot enhance her reputation. She is a stranger to contrition. She regrets only the haste with which she tried to implement an economic plan that she believes was sabotaged by the establishment.

She thinks the meltdown in financial markets that brought her down was engineered by the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility. Truss’s bizarre demeanour, self-regarding without self-awareness, limits the purchase her ideas might get on public opinion, even with audiences primed for conspiracy theory. The loudest cheers when she appears on television are from the Labour party.

Liz Truss is back – kind of. The former PM of just 49 days has published a book, Ten Years to Save the West. The Guardian’s political correspondent Eleni Courea and breaking news correspondent Martin Pengelly discuss her seeming lack of regret

Despite just 49 days in office during which the British pound reached an all-time low against the dollar in reaction to Liz Truss’s mini-budget, Truss remains defiant and has published her views on how to “save the west” in a book.

Today in Focus host Helen Pidd speaks to the Guardian’s political correspondent Eleni Courea about what Truss has been up to since her resignation and what she may be hoping to achieve with the publication of her book, Ten Years to Save the West. Helen also talks to Washington breaking news correspondent Martin Pengelly for his thoughts on the book and whether Truss has shown any remorse for the decisions made during her short-lived premiership

Thanks to the Brussels police the National Conservatism usual suspects could feel they really were relevant and important

You’ve seldom seen Nigel Farage look quite so happy. Beatific bordering on ecstasy. And all because he had been cancelled. Something he has longed for all his career. Failing to be elected as an MP on seven separate occasions was just proof of the limitations of democracy. Winning the Brexit referendum was almost a disappointment. What was there left for him to do? Other than to sniff around the far right in the US. Hoping for scraps. A sense of identity. But on Tuesday all his dreams came true.

Last year’s National Conservatism conference in London had been largely forgettable apart from a few attention-seeking appearances from people most go out of their way to avoid. And even these were no more than period pieces, designed merely to preach to the couple of hundred of the already converted. An exercise in futility. No more, no less.

Commons leader known to have reservations about PM’s plan, as Liz Truss swipes at ‘unelected’ officials

• UK politics – latest updates

Penny Mordaunt, a potential Conservative leadership challenger to Rishi Sunak, is among the cabinet ministers wavering over whether to support the prime minster’s generational smoking ban.

Mordaunt, the leader of the House of Commons, is known to have reservations about the prime minister’s tobacco and vapes bill and the precedent it would set for banning other unhealthy things.

Can you guess which things Liz Truss actually claimed in her book and which are our fantastic inventions?

Cometh the hour, cometh the memoir, and from Tuesday people can enjoy in full the apocalyptically titled Liz Truss book Ten Years to Save the West. She says she wants people to read it to “learn the lessons of the battle I lost”. That battle apparently being staying in Downing Street for more than 49 days. But how much have you picked up from the published snippets and Truss’s interviews about her book? Can you spot what she actually said from our ridiculous inventions? And did she really think that about the Queen dying? Find out with our Liz Truss quiz!

The Guardian’s Liz Truss quiz

The former PM’s book claims she was undermined by ‘establishment’ enemies. It instead shows exactly why her friends deserted her

So it wasn’t just a bad dream, then. Liz Truss really did become prime minister, and that brief ensuing moment of madness really did happen. It must have done because she’s written a book about it, though given the brevity of her stay at No 10 it’s arguably less a memoir of her time there than a kind of extended Tripadvisor review. (Great location for central London; shame about the fleas .) And while calling it Ten Years to Save the West may suggest faintly deluded levels of self-belief, given Britain had to be saved from the author after less than seven weeks , it’s accidentally very revealing about the deeper reasons for that overconfidence and what they mean for the country.

Truss entered parliament in the golden Tory era of 2010, and prospered despite bosses who clearly grasped her faults. (Theresa May, she writes, wanted to sack her but didn’t feel strong enough; Boris Johnson’s allies have long suspected he promoted her to crowd the pitch for others he considered more of a serious threat.) In comparison with Labour politicians of the time, she was therefore playing politics mostly on the easy setting: one where the biggest newspapers bend over backwards to be kind, the City broadly shares your view of wealth creation, and a lack of serious challenge from the opposition makes it possible to believe that the facts of life will remain Conservative, regardless of what Conservatism itself actually morphs into.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist