We finally found Liz Truss – and immediately wished we hadn’t

The prime minister finally emerged from her bunker to give a series of interviews to local radio, writes John Rentoul

The search parties returned this morning (Reuters)

The search parties returned this morning, saying that they had found the prime minister. She had turned up in a studio in London, giving a series of seven-minute interviews to local BBC radio stations. This is quite a rigmarole, commonly engaged in by authors with a book to promote or politicians setting out their stall in advance of their annual party conference.

Liz Truss presumably agreed to it before the mini-Budget on Friday, and decided that it would be too embarrassing to cancel it – just as, on a larger scale, there is no question of her cancelling her party conference or, indeed, cancelling any of the mini-Budget measures or sacking her chancellor.

I don’t know if she really thinks she is like Margaret Thatcher, who resisted pressure for a U-turn on unpopular economic policy in 1981, or if she simply recognises how disastrous it would be to admit she got it wrong. How much more disastrous, that is, than the cloud of rubble and dust already engulfing her three-week-old government.