With a wearying inevitability, Liz Truss has gone from one row to another. One of her own cabinet ministers, Leader of the Commons Penny Mordaunt, has warned her against cutting benefits. She told Times Radio:

‘I’ve always supported – whether it’s pensions, whether it’s our welfare system – keeping pace with inflation. It makes sense to do so. That’s what I voted for before.’ 

This is the kind of cabinet indiscipline that you’d expect in the weakest and latter days of a premiership, not the first few weeks.

Mordaunt joins a growing list of Tories who have broken cover to insist benefits must be uprated in line with inflation. As I wrote yesterday, even the Work and Pensions Secretary Chloe Smith made clear on the conference stage that she wasn’t keen to make these kinds of cuts, saying ‘protecting the most vulnerable is a big priority for me’. Once again, I have spoken to a lot of MPs in the government who aren’t prepared to break cover yet but who would resign and vote against the government on this matter.

Truss has insisted on her morning broadcast round that ‘no decision’ has been taken on whether to update benefits in line with inflation or earnings (the latter would be a real-terms cut). But she is still conforming to the pattern of the 45p climbdown. As she herself has acknowledged, there wasn’t enough pitch-rolling before the Chancellor announced the abolition of the 45p rate. In this instance, there hasn’t been an attempt to argue that it would be acceptable to cut benefits at this time. It has allowed Truss’s opponents, including the formidable Michael Gove, to frame the issue themselves. It means that if Truss now starts trying to claim that this is about ‘fairness’ and helping people in work vs those on benefits, she will struggle, because Tory MPs and the public at large are much more aware that 40 per cent of universal credit claimants are in work.

In the parties and bars in Birmingham last night, the 45p reversal hadn’t really calmed Tory nerves. In fact, many MPs and aides I spoke to seemed even more resigned to their party heading for a period of opposition after the next election. I say ‘resigned’, but perhaps a more accurate description would be that many are longing for a break. The way the party is behaving is tantamount to a cry for help from someone hoping for an intervention from friends and family. In politics, that generally means the electorate booting you out of government and into rehab, better known as opposition.

For a full list of Spectator Tory conference fringe events, click here