“When are you going to govern? The only thing you have governed for the past year is your own survival.” (Jess Phillips, Labour MP, October 20, 2022).
British politics has revealed hidden depths, each one being sought as each prime minister succumbs. The announcement by Liz Truss that she would be resigning came after a mere 45 days in office. In terms of duration, this would make her the shortest serving PM since the Tory George Canning, who died of tuberculosis in August 1827 after holding office for 119 days.
The sequence of events from the moment Truss entered Downing Street on September 6th is bound to induce vertigo. She promised a package of eyebrow raising energy-price guarantees and tax cuts on September 23rd. She fantasised about growing Britain and demonised a fictional cabal of anti-growth opponents lurking on the opposition benches and on the streets. Central to such policies, as Tim Bale of Queen Mary University describes it, is “the myth that we can have Scandinavian levels of welfare on American levels of taxation.”
The calamitous mini-Budget delivered seven days later spooked the markets and encouraged a fall in the pound. The promise to abolish the tax bracket of 45p was scrapped. Then came the sacking of Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, supposedly Truss’s close ally. In a manner befitting the friendship, Kwarteng was blamed for announcing Truss’s policies. Jeremy Hunt, his replacement drawn from political oblivion, took the hammer to the fragile edifice of supply-side Trussonomics and promised to further puncture it. Britannia was being rechained.
In the maelstrom, jokes began to proliferate and thicken as each disastrous decision was made, and then unmade. With such a sequence of inglorious crashes, the Economist suggested that Truss’s time would be comparable to the “shelf-life of a lettuce.”
The Daily Star set up a webcam in tribute to the observation, featuring a wilting iceberg lettuce from Tesco, valued at 60p. The paper poses the following question on the site: “Will Liz Truss be Prime Minister within the 10-day shelf-life of a lettuce?” At lunchtime on October 20, when Truss made her resignation statement, the lettuce received a plastic gold crown. The caption was one of triumph: “The Lettuce Outlasted Liz Truss.” Then came the national anthem, accompanied by champagne.
The resignation speech retained that air of unreality on steroids that characterised Truss’s brief sojourn in Downing Street. There was the old mantra, the “vision for a low tax, high growth economy – that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit.” She underlined her achievements in controlling energy bills and cutting national insurance. Apart from giving Russia’s Vladimir Putin a mention for threatening “the security of our whole continent,” that was more or less that.
The Economist, now confirmed in its predictions, gloomily coined the term “Britaly”, a land “of political instability, low growth and subordination to the bond markets.” With acid irony, it noted that Truss and Kwarteng, as contributors to a pamphlet “Britannia Unchained”, had warned that Britain should not go the way of Italy and other southern European countries, encumbered by bloated public services, tardy growth and poor productivity. Their “botched attempt to forge a different path” had done just that.
The UK’s indignant Italian ambassador Inigo Lambertini added some flavour to the comparison by rejecting the paper’s use of a cover “inspired by the oldest of stereotypes.” Why go for spaghetti and pizza when you might consider an example from “our aerospace, biotech, automotive or pharmaceutical sectors?” Any other choice “would cast a more accurate spotlight on Italy, also taking into account your not so secret admiration for our economic model.”
Since 2016, British politics has claimed the scalps of four leaders, reminding pundits of Australia’s own revolving door of prime ministers (that country boasted five between 2010 and 2018). David Cameron, injudiciously and arrogantly, called a referendum on leaving the European Union. Designed to stifle anti-EU voices within his own Conservative Party while enabling him to stay in power, it did quite the opposite. There were no plans in the event of Britain leaving the Union, let alone any strategy.
Brexit became a millstone of defining proportions, hampering Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, who found maintaining party discipline amongst the Tories impossible. Europhobic and Little England sentiments were in the ascendant. Enter Boris Johnson, whose populist, baffling antics had their desired effect: a comprehensive victory in 2019 with the slogan “get Brexit done.” Global Britain, nostalgic and starry-eyed, had arrived.
Johnson’s time in office impoverished British politics and denigrated the Sceptred Isle’s famed sense of dour stability. He was found to have behaved unconstitutionally in proroguing parliament. He mishandled and derided the coronavirus pandemic. He flouted rules made by his own officials, holding clandestine gatherings even as the rest of Britain stayed locked in and prevented from seeing family and friends. He was fined for doing so and eventually resigned for lying over the partygate affair. His list of abuses had no end and seemingly no beginning.
With the resignation of Johnson, the Tories went into selectorate mode, giving the British voters a taste of tribal war before debates held between Truss and her contender, former Chancellor Rishi Sunak. Truss, demagogic and deluded, won through, convincing a white-haired and greying percentage of Conservative Party members that she had the magic. With this pro-growth creature, ironically herself ungrown in so many ways, the horror show continued.
No sensible person will be seeking the office. But the Tory Party is riddled with the insensible. Sunak is likely to recontest. The leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, is also a contender. Even Johnson, who did more than most to denigrate the office, is contemplating a return. For the moment, the lettuce won out. At the very least, it deserves a run.
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I happened to be on tour in 2010 and in the U K when the election of Cameron took place. The mood was barren, bored, but Brown was on the way down. Since then twelve years of brown droppings have occurred, with intellectual, moral and ethical barrenness growing. Cameron went, not missed, May expired from static, Johson befouled the office and No.10 literally, and now, this immense vacuum of intellectual aridity has spent itself. Brexit has come and gone and with it hopes of sanity and prosperity. What now? Who would know? People who are barely toilet trained get the big job, Morrisonians all. What can trump Truss?
Politics of either flavour, seem to run out of puff. When mad ideology seems to rule the party. The death spiral is truly mind boggling to see.
Larry the cat, with the lettuce as deputy.
They cannot ppossibly do a worse job than the last four have done.
Good article and the sentence:
‘Since 2016, British politics has claimed the scalps of four leaders, reminding pundits of Australia’s own revolving door of prime ministers (that country boasted five between 2010 and 2018).’
You could add the GOP ‘leadership’ to the turmoil and ask the question, why these three Anglosphere nations? Hollowed out parties lacking grounded constituents and policies, that require and/or rely upon broad support from right wing media, as the policies are unpalatable to most, since they are US ‘radical right libertarian’ economics.
They all channel Koch Network agitprop and ‘economics’ via Brexit, pro-Trump and pro fossil fuels think tanks the ‘economics’ was informed by Austrian-Chicago-Virginia School’s ‘segregation economist’ James Buchanan, who also was involved in Pinochet’s Chile; eugenics masquerading as economic theory (according to Nancy MacLean of ‘Democracy in Chains’).
The Atlantic had an article, inc. input from MacLean, July/August 2017 that explains well in short form ‘The Architect of the Radical Right. How the Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan shaped today’s anti-government politics’, and help create chaos on the right and markets when governments try to implement the same policies.
Y’know, the headline for this should have been “Exit Liz Truss, pursued by a lettuce”, but maybe that’s a bit too abstruse for the general readership.
The search is on for the next person to step up for the wet lettuce comparison…
Bring back Boris, at least he had a sense of theatre of the absurd.
Who can forget his mocking of the lockdowns: Lockdowns for thee, not me.
Liz will probably get a gig as guest speaker @ WEF gigs, so she’ll be right mate.
Life moves on, and the wheels on the bus go clank, clank, clank; clank clank clank 🙂
Bring back Boris, suggests Charles IV. I think he jests. In truth, the bottom of the barrel has already been scraped. It’s empty, and there are no grown-ups available. Britain, by extension, is currently fucked.
A great read, Dr Kampmark, and a lovely follow up, Andrew.
You got to giggle in Europe full of hernias and food shortages, they had a truss lasting 44 days, including a fortnight from the queen, and a melon just sworn in.
May, be her turn again???