DID YOU MISS PART ONE OF LIZ TRUSS’S BOOK IN YESTERDAY’S DAILY MAIL? SCAN HERE TO READ IT ON MAIL+

I KNEW the party conference would be difficult. I needed to keep the Cabinet on board, deal with restive MPs and not show any chinks in the armour. I could certainly forget about enjoying the political honeymoon most Prime Ministers given on taking office. The parliamentary party was deeply divided and had acquired the habits of rebellion and regicide against its leaders. In the space of three years, Theresa May and then Boris Johnson had been brought down by their own MPs, making the position of Conservative

Party leader more precarious than it had previously appeared.

MPs who had remained loyal resented those who had ousted them and vice versa. We had then been through a bruising leadership contest that further fractured party unity and poisoned personal relationships – and in which more than half the parliamentary party had supported my opponents.

Many of them actively wanted to bring me down and, having seen the fate of my predecessors, had high hopes of doing so.

Could I have done more to win them over? I’m gregarious and I like people, but even my best

friends wouldn’t describe me as a great people manager.

Perhaps I also haven’t spent enough time during my career listening to and empathising with my parliamentary colleagues.

And I probably haven’t done a very good job of hiding what I think about some of them either!

By the time I got to the conference, rebel MPs were pouring kerosene on the market jitters and my poor opinion poll ratings. They had also fomented a revolt about the 45p tax rate.

I wasn’t all that surprised Michael Gove was leading it, because I knew he had antigrowth instincts.

In Manchester, I was stuck in my suite on the top floor of the hotel,

with people constantly coming and going, while having to endure the familiar strains of protesters with loudspeakers outside. It was like a mini-Downing Street.

I was occasionally let out for a walk. Otherwise, I was isolated up there with my practice podium for rehearsing my big speech and an endless supply of American pancakes and maple syrup. At least the conference was one of the few occasions when my daughters Frances and Liberty were able to join us. They were smuggled in under the guise of being Welsh Young Conservatives.

Little did the lobby journalists getting into the lifts with Rosie and Molly from Cardiff North know they were my daughters

incognito. Suffice to say, they had more fun than I did.

Up in my suite, I received a number of delegations of colseeking

leagues pressing for various policies to be reversed, in particular the abolition of the 45p tax rate.

It steadily became evident that