Zoik! The screen went dead on the Liz ’n’ Laura show

FOR someone who’d spent the past week being deafened by blood-curdling screams from the international markets, Liz Truss was looking remarkably resilient. The hair was neat, the pose steady, the eyes crystalline and free from puff and bulge. Give it time, her harried predecessors in No 10 might say. In six months, those perky peepers will be drooping from their sockets like aspidistras in a drought.

Fresh from her recent – and not entirely trouble-free – whistlestop tour of regional radio stations last week, the Prime Minister had agreed to appear on Laura Kuenssberg’s newish BBC1 programme ahead of the Tory party conference in Birmingham.

Broadcast time was the ungodly hour of 8.30am. Is it me, or do these politics shows get earlier every year?

No sooner had Miss Kuenssberg begun to introduce her special guest when, zoik! The screen went dead. Had some fat-fingered studio grunt spilt their matcha latte over the control panel? Had the legions of crusty protesters milling around the conference found a plug to yank from the wall?

Either way, the watching millions of political geeks and Twitter warriors had about 30 seconds of agonised worry. The Beeb later blamed ‘technical glitches’ for the blackout.

By the time the feed returned, Liz ’n’ Laura were already hard at it discussing struggling households’ budgets. Naturally, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s recent fiscal bombshell was much-dissected. A squiggly graph was produced showing how much the cost of government borrowing had gone up since Kwasi delivered his mini-Budget and Britannia was unchained. Yikes: The line on this thing looked steeper than K2.

Truss remained stoic throughout. She admitted the communication out of Downing Street ahead of the mini-Budget was not without error. ‘We should have laid the ground work better for that,’ she said. Later, asked whether she’d informed the rest of the Cabinet about Kwarteng’s plan to cut the top rate of tax, she replied with a unapologetic: ‘No.’ Fair enough, I say.

Kuenssberg tried to needle her, the broadcaster’s microphone

occasionally catching an exasperated grunt – and even the odd drawn-out sigh of frustration. She kept pressing Truss for answers on what the Government planned to do about benefits or pensions – but not with much success.

Three times Laura sought to get Truss to admit she wanted to cut public spending. The PM insisted she simply wanted ‘value for money for the taxpayer’. Google Translate: There’s a lot of waste we can bin.

It was a long and arduous going-over, but the PM just about held it together. The voice remained slow and steady. Occasionally, a facial twitch would betray mild flashes of irritation. Meanwhile, that left arm of her of hers that tends to get animated during discussion was whirring around in circles constantly, as though she was whipping up a mousseline.

It was put to the PM that tax cuts for the well-off made for terrible optics. Truss was fed up of how things looked. Far too much was made of it, she suggested: what matters is results.

As the PM carried on talking, a man with a video camera appeared in the window directly behind, trying to film her. I wondered idly whether one of Truss’s bodyguards might jump out of nowhere and zap him with a Taser. It might have enlivened proceedings.

Finally, Kuenssberg demanded, what happens if the Government’s financial plans don’t work? Hang tight, was the Trussian message. Her plans would deliver. And if they don’t, presumably she’ll just sack the Chancellor.