Britain will have a new prime minister next week.
In the end, the lettuce won. 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.
The other lesson is that the prime-ministerial system allows political parties to ditch a leader who has become a liability. None of this sitting around until November hoping the president doesn’t advocate injecting yourself with Clorox again—no, Liz Truss managed 44 days as prime minister before her own party made it clear that her services were no longer required. (To convert that into American measurements, that’s about four Scaramuccis.) She is now the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, racking up less than half the tenure of a guy who died of tuberculosis.
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. Watching her stagger on began to seem cruel.
Since I opened the casket for a sniff on Monday, the Truss administration has continued to decay with impressive speed. Yesterday morning, the prime minister was forced to suspend one of her closest advisers for allegedly calling a former cabinet colleague “shit” in a press briefing. That afternoon, Home Secretary Suella Braverman resigned after accidentally forwarding a confidential briefing from her personal email account. “Pretending we haven’t made mistakes, carrying on as if everyone can’t see that we have made them, and hoping that things will magically come right is not serious politics,” Braverman wrote in her resignation letter.
