Labour MPs broke into laughter after Penny Mordaunt said an under-fire Liz Truss could not face MPs after she was “detained on urgent business”.
Labour had demanded that Truss come to the Commons chamber to answer an urgent question on the sacking of her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and the current economic turmoil.
But Mordaunt, the Commons leader and Truss’s former leadership rival, was instead sent to answer in her place.
Laughter erupted on opposition benches after Mordaunt said MPs would have to “make do with me” because the prime minister had been “detained on urgent business”.
Labour leader Keir Starmer quipped in response: “I guess under this Tory government everyone gets to be prime minister for 15 minutes.”
He added: “It’s time for leaders to lead. But where is the prime minister? Hiding away, dodging questions, scared of her own shadow.
“The lady is not for turning — up.”
The decision to send Mordaunt to the Commons coalface will add to the perception that the prime minister has lost the credibility and authority to lead.
It came after Truss’s new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, issued an emergency statement in which he tore up the core aspects of her disastrous mini-budget and dismantled her entire economic vision.
Hunt watered down the prime minister’s plans to limit average energy bills to £2,500, saying that this guarantee would only last until April and not for the two-year period previously planned.
He also ditched Truss’s plan to reduce the basic rate of income tax from 20p to 19p, saying it would stay at its current rate “indefinitely”.
The series of U-turns has put Truss under further pressure as MPs openly question whether she has the authority and mandate to govern.
So far, four MPs have called on Truss to quit. There has been speculation that Truss could be replaced by Hunt, former chancellor Rishi Sunak or even Mordaunt herself.
Crispin Blunt, who was the first MP to call for Truss to go, said her authority was now “fatally damaged” while Angela Richardson, the MP for Guildford, said the current problems with the public finances were “100% down to the prime minister”.
Mordaunt defended the prime minister’s absence and her decision to sack Kwarteng, saying her “overriding priority” was to “restore financial stability in the face of volatile global conditions”.
She said to Starmer: “I’m quietly confident that the leader opposite will not have his 15 minutes of fame.”
On Kwarteng’s sacking, Mordaunt said it was the “right thing to do” and “it took courage”.
“The decision taken by our prime minister would have been a very tough one, politically and personally,” she said.
“Yet, she has taken it. And she has done so because it is manifestly in the national interest that she did.
“She did not hesitate to do so because her focus is on the wellbeing of every one of our citizens. It was the right thing to do. And whether you agree with it or not, it took courage to do it.
“In contrast, what the right honourable gentleman has done today, at this most serious moment, took no courage or judgment or regard to the national interest.”