‘I assumed upon entering Downing Street that my mandate would be respected and accepted. How wrong I was.’ This is the crux of Liz Truss’s defence of her 49 days in Downing Street: the shortest-ever stint for a Prime Minister. It is also the start of her attempt at a political comeback.

Writing in today’s Sunday Telegraph, Truss gives us, for the first time, her account of things: 4,000 of her own words on ‘what happened’ last autumn and what she’s learned from it. Mistakes were made, she admits: in fact, they were all-but-guaranteed, she says, as she had ‘a vast amount to do and very little time in which to do it’. She repeats, as she did last year, that ‘communication could have been better.’ Truss is not ‘claiming to be blameless in what happened,’ though the details of what she most regrets are largely skirted over. But as she tells the story – from Boris Johnson’s resignation, all the way through to her own – it becomes very clear she places most of the blame elsewhere. She signposts nearly every political event with details on the many ways she felt her economic agenda was undermined, ‘by a very powerful economic establishment, coupled with a lack of political support.’

Who exactly was doing the undermining, in Truss’s view? ‘The Treasury.’ The ‘system.’ The ‘wider orthodox economic ecosystem.’ The ‘blob of vested interests.’ To her detractors, this will sound like borderline conspiracy; an attempt to place the blame anywhere but No10. To her supporters, these comments will ring true, as she details the frustrations of having to deal with a Treasury focused on ‘micro, top-down, tinkering’ and the Office for Budget Responsibility, which she describes as the real ‘driver of fiscal policy’: so powerful with its forecasts that ‘undervalue the benefits of low taxes and supply side reforms for economic growth.’

These economic actors are not the only naysayers. Shade is thrown at ‘the media’ for taking the many struggles facing Britain last autumn and using the government as a ‘useful scapegoat.’ Truss doesn’t pull punches: not even for her own party. While she does not formally add the Tory party to her infamous ‘anti-growth coalition’ list, she heavily implies it deserves top billing. ‘I underestimated the resistance inside the Conservative Parliamentary Party to move to a lower-tax, less regulated economy,’ she writes, while also accusing her fellow MPs of ‘triangulating with Labour policy’ over the last decade, instead of promoting conservative beliefs. No doubt recent rebellions within the Tory party over planning reform have emboldened her take.

But what really did her government in, she says, was not any element of her mini-Budget, which she still stands behind and believes would have worked to boost economic growth. In Truss’s view, it was the LDI pension scare that drove things off a cliff:

‘Brewing in the background there was an issue relating to pension funds of which neither of us had been made aware of – a problem that would ultimately bring my premiership to an abrupt and premature end because of the panic it induced.’

The Bank’s decision to start fiscal tightening the day before the mini-Budget ‘put pension funds under pressure’, she says. Then exposed vulnerabilities (and mismanagement) of LDIs explains the ‘dramatic movements in the bond market’, creating a ‘very difficult environment’ for the mini-Budget to succeed.

This timeline will be questioned: it was just hours after her then-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng sat down from delivering the mini-Budget that the pound started to fall and borrowing costs for the UK started to rise. Over the weekend, Kwarteng doubled down on the plans, telling the world it hadn’t seen anything yet, and when markets opened on Monday the situation deteriorated rapidly. That was how the LDI crisis came to the fore – a result of fast-rising gilt yields following the mini-Budget – and the Bank started buying gilts to help steady the situation.

This won’t be the only timeline quibble for Truss. Claims that it ‘would not have been appropriate’ to use the OBR for the mini-Budget because it wouldn’t take into account the details of a ‘Medium Term Fiscal Plan’ announced ‘a few weeks later’ seem to forget that the date for that fiscal statement was only announced by Kwarteng after the mini-Budget – as part of an emergency response to its negative reception.

But the debate that is sure to follow from Truss’s account of dates, times and events poses a much larger question: to what extent was the perfect storm that gathered over Britain’s economy last year a result of external factors, and to what extent was it her government’s fault? Interest rates were going up world-over last autumn, as the era of cheap money was finally declared to be over. But why did the UK lead the pack? The OBR does indeed have a history of underestimating supply-side reforms. This was witnessed during the Cameron years, as his labour market reforms boosted economic activity more than expected. But can one blame the OBR’s negative forecasting when, on this occasion, there was no forecast (on Truss’s demand)?

For all the economic boogeymen Truss names in her oped as part of the problem, there is a rather important actor that doesn’t get much of a mention: ‘the markets.’ It is not impossible to believe that bias, and indeed pure politics, are embedded in the many institutions that weigh in on Britain’s economy. But in the end, it was investors worldwide – not politicos– who were looking at the UK and thinking the numbers didn’t add up.

This is what, even now, Truss has not addressed: what happened to the spending side of the ledger during her premiership. In her account of all that went wrong last autumn, her plan to add tens of billions of pounds to the deficit for day-to-day spending is not included.

Truss believes that she got the diagnosis of Britain’s economic woes exactly right

Instead, she defends the Energy Price Guarantee, insisting that a cheaper, ‘targeted scheme was impossible given the urgency of the situation’ – despite targeted schemes already created and implemented by government throughout the year. She writes in today’s essay about radical plans to address the national debt, including ‘raising the pension age’. Of course none of this was ever mentioned during the leadership contest. If she had a plan for deficit reduction, the markets were not aware. No one was. The whole summer and early autumn were spent promising to borrow for tax cuts and more spending.

Truss believes that she got the diagnosis of Britain’s economic woes exactly right. Today, she is asking readers to put more emphasis on that diagnosis than on the outcome of her attempted solutions. Some will symapthise with Truss was trying to do. Others will struggle with how little responsibility she has decided to take for what happened.

Truss seems to think, despite her mandate from party members, that the cards were stacked against her from the beginning, not least because of a ‘broader consensus in favour of raising taxes’ she thinks has taken hold of Whitehall. Her supporters are likely to agree. Yet she does not address how the consequences of her premiership directly led to those higher taxes she detests: after all it was not Rishi Sunak, but Truss herself who handed the reins of the economy over to Jeremy Hunt to start fiscal tightening after the mini-Budget.

Ultimately, Truss believes she was judged and pushed out ‘almost entirely on the “optics”’. That, and, ‘large parts of the media and the wider public sphere had become unfamiliar with key arguments about tax and economic policy and over time sentiment had shifted leftwards.’ That second point is almost certainly true. But after reading today’s essay, I continue to wonder (as I have for some time) if Truss lost her way too. She dressed up price controls and a massive-spending agenda as free-market economics, and is still defending this position as ‘economically sound.’ The Liz Truss of just a few years ago would have never allowed a prime minister, current or former, off the hook for muddling up such ideas. But doubling down on ‘Trussonomics’ is how she is reentering the political arena.

We’ll find out soon enough what the reaction is to her comeback: from both her fellow MPs and the country at large. Some will spring forth with praise – and criticism. Others will sit quietly and wait, wanting more than several months’ separation from events to decide what really happened. We’re set to hear more about ‘the lessons’ she has ‘learned in the coming weeks and months.’ Regardless of reception, this is simply the start of Truss’s return.