Truss is Toast, But Where Does That Leave the UK?

It's a bit worse than that. After my check-in with British politics showing Prime Minister Liz Truss - barely a month into her tenure - facing collapse of her government already, Truss was measured up to a head of lettuce - to see if a fresh head of lettuce could outlast her - and failed, miserably (via Helen Lewis at the Atlantic):

...Six days ago, Liz Truss’s leadership was in such trouble that a British tabloid began a livestream to test a simple proposition: Could the shelf life of a supermarket vegetable outlast her time as prime minister?

Today, the lettuce looked a little bruised, but it could still be incorporated into a healthy salad. Sadly, Liz Truss serves no such useful purpose. At 1:30 p.m. London time, she announced that she was leaving office. Her replacement will be elected next week.

The saga of Liz and the lettuce tells us many things about British political culture, one of which is its taste for lousy jokes. How was the Brexiteer Liz Truss brought down? A Romaine plot. Why did she make so many mistakes? Just cos. Was her decision to give a tax cut to the rich her fatal error? No, it was just the tip of the iceberg. Be thankful there aren’t more varieties of lettuce...

What went wrong? As I wrote earlier this week, everything. Her economic plans made the markets shudder. Her staffing decisions alienated her colleagues. Her poll numbers suggested that the Conservatives were heading for an electoral wipeout. Britain’s economic situation is extremely precarious: Inflation is higher than 10 percent, food banks are warning about elevated demand, and there is a small possibility of electricity blackouts over the winter. Yet despite the widespread fear these things engender, in the end, so much went wrong for Truss that people kept telling me they felt sorry for her. She was absolutely hopeless...

It's been noted that in reference to the short career of Scaramucci (11 days), Liz Truss lasted about 4 Scaramuccis. Hardly the best thing for her resume. Truss' tenure was so short the political biographies on her getting rushed out to the bookstores for Christmas are already obsolete.

That all said, the question now is "Who is foolish enough to replace her as Prime Minister?"

I mentioned this in the last article: This whole fiasco "...Exposes the Conservatives with the painful reality that they have ousted two Prime Ministers within within 6 months of each other, and creating a leadership crisis among factions who are fighting amongst themselves for high office. A situation that will consume the next unlucky soul who signs up as PM because their party's Brexit platform will condemn that fool to more failure."

In a horrifying development, Boris Johnson is eyeing a return to the job that his own party drove him from three months ago. He still has a fanbase within the Tory ranks, even though enough of the Conservatives were sick of Boris' constant scandalous behavior and constant lying. It's as though Boris is thinking "Well, they've seen the worst of what my replacement Liz has done, surely they will forgive me and bring me back to power."

That is, of course, utter madness (and a terrifying sign of Boris' narcissism). One of the reasons the Conservatives are down in the polls is the loss of trust that happened on Johnson's watch. There are no signs that the British voters are willing to forgive Boris for his failures getting his Brexit plans to work, and especially not about to forgive him for his mishandling of the COVID pandemic and the self-serving scandals that doomed him.

When Boris faced his No Confidence vote in June 2022, it was followed by a series of party-breaking resignations that threatened to gut his Cabinet and wreck whatever government he could form, which drove him to resign (although he took all summer to do so). There are no signs that Boris can form a new government today. The Tories themselves are so divided by factions that if Boris forces himself back into the big chair that one of those factions will split off and wreck the weakening Conservative majority, forcing a special election now instead of 2024.

Even if it isn't Boris retaking 10 Downing Street, whomever does get the job faces the same problem of either major faction - either the Ultra Brexits who want their utopia, or the moderates looking to rebuild a trade deal with the European Union that could regain some economic stability (what a Soft Brexit could have been) - splitting off out of sheer spite. Whatever happens, this current situation is untenable, but the Conservatives are so bound to their Brexit fantasies that they cannot stop themselves.

This clown car is still falling off the cliff, everybody. It's a question of how sharp the jagged rocks are below.