IT was the perfect way to start a Sunday. Up with the wintry but welcome sun, a pot of tea, hot toast slathered in butter, and a 4000-word essay from Liz Truss.

Maybe not the latter, but so it goes. Regardless of demand, Britain’s shortest-serving Prime Minister was back with the longest excuse note in politics for her disastrous 49-day reign.

Basically, it wisnae her. Or, to be precise, it wisnae all her. It was you, left-wing economic establishment. And you, Conservative Party. And you, Mr and Mrs Public. The list of those to blame ran across two broadsheet pages of the Sunday Telegraph, with a write-off for the front page splash.

“I am not claiming to be blameless in what happened,” wrote Ms Truss, “but fundamentally I was not given a realistic chance to enact my policies by a very powerful economic establishment, coupled with a lack of political support.”

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She assumed on entering Number 10 that her mandate would be accepted and respected. “How wrong I was. While I anticipated resistance to my programme from the system, I underestimated the extent of it.

“Similarly, I underestimated the resistance inside the Conservative parliamentary party to move to a lower-tax, less-regulated economy.”

Likening her efforts to “pushing water uphill”, she added: “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 left-wards.”

Despite being the main talk of the Sunday politics shows, Ms Truss was nowhere to be seen. That only left more time for others to comment on her arguments. The reviews were not great.

First with his distinctly zero stars review was Gavin Barwell, former chief of staff to Theresa May, who told Ms Truss in a tweet: “You were brought down because in a matter of weeks you lost the confidence of the financial markets, the electorate and your own MPs. During a profound cost of living crisis, you thought it was a priority to cut tax for the richest people in the country.”

On Sky News’ Sophy Ridge On Sunday, shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds was just as frosty: “Will there ever be a Conservative willing to take responsibility for their own actions?” he asked.

“Liz Truss had to stand down because her policies were incoherent and unsustainable and the idea she’s been brought down by a left-wing economic establishment – she’s been brought down by straightforward economics.”

But what of the Minister touring the Sunday studios, Grant Shapps? Now the Business Secretary, Liz Truss had been his boss for all of six days when she appointed him Home Secretary.

On BBC1's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, he was asked if Liz Truss’s approach on the economy had been the right one. “Clearly, it wasn’t,” he said.

Sir Jake Berry, former Conservative Party chairman, was a lone voice on her side. He told Kuenssberg: “I still agree with Liz’s diagnosis of the disease that is facing the country and I think she accepts in this story that the prescription that we wrote – which I have to take part of the blame – wasn’t delivered in the correct way.”

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Labour MP Liz Kendall, a fellow panellist on Kuenssberg, predicted trouble ahead for the Prime Minister because many Tory MPs backed her plea for lower taxes now to boost growth.

But last month Rishi Sunak said only “idiots” would expect tax cuts in next month’s Budget.

Ms Truss insisted that ultimately she would have been proven correct. While her experience last autumn was “bruising for me personally”, she believed that over the medium term her policies would have increased growth and brought down debt.

“I still believe that seeking to deliver the original policy prescription on which I had fought the leadership election was the right thing to do, but the forces against it were too great,” she wrote.

Ms Truss was pictured in the Sunday Telegraph perched on a desk in a style once made famous by Scots broadcaster Kirsty Young on Channel 5 News. Behind the former premier was a graphic portrait of what looked like Che Guevera dressed as Napoleon.

The caption on the photos did not say where they had been taken, but the bookshelves made for interesting reading. Among the titles were Anthony Seldon’s biography of Tony Blair, a well-worn copy of Nigel Lawson’s memoir, The View from No 11, What a Carve Up, Jonathan Coe’s blistering satire about Thatcherism, a collection of Boris Johnson’s writing, and a book titled “50 People Who Buggered Up Britain”.

She closed her piece with a promise to “expand upon the lessons I have learnt in the coming weeks and months”. Maybe she’ll even do it in person.