Hoopla around Truss and Rayner shows Michael Ashcroft still steering the debate

Former Tory chair turned political biographer and publisher is behind books that have put former PM and Labour's deputy in the spotlights

If this week's tetchy exchanges between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak at prime minister's questions proved one thing, it was the ability of the veteran businessman, donor and publisher Michael Ashcroft to set the political agenda.

While Starmer revelled in the publication of 10 Years to Save the West, which was written by the former prime minister Liz Truss and published this week by Ashcroft's Biteback Publishing, Sunak wanted to focus on another Biteback book - Ashcroft's own Red Queen?, a biography of Labour's deputy leader, Angela Rayner.