This Side of the Pond

Well, that was quick. Hot on the heels of losing the longest-reigning monarch in British history, we have a new record-holder for the shortest-serving prime minister and someone new in charge of the UK for the second time in two months – it’s enough to give you whiplash.

Liz Truss was doomed from the start, but few could have predicted she’d only last 45 days in the job. George Canning, the man who held this dubious record before her, managed five months – and he didn’t really step down so much as keel over during a bout of pneumonia (it was the 1820s, after all, when a paper cut could still be deadly).

But for Liz, the omens were there from the day she took office. She replaced the divisive Boris Johnson, who nobody believed was really going to depart until we saw him leave 10 Downing Street with our own eyes, and even then we were sure there was a plan to get him back in.

Within two days, the nation had forgotten all about the Liz in charge of the government due to the death of the Liz who had been our nation’s strength and stay, and there’s surely nothing that could overshadow the dawn of a premiership more thoroughly than a tragedy of royal proportions.

Liz dutifully observed the mourning period, during which time normal politics was suspended. But she sealed her own fate at the end of the week when she announced what she termed a “mini-budget”.

Such a little, unassuming name for such a destructive decision. Her new policy included £45 billion in tax cuts, mainly for the rich, that would be funded by borrowing.

Her intent was to deliver on the promises she’d been making on the campaign trail: to cancel the rise in the UK’s version of social security and in corporation tax. Trouble was, she took things too far and tried to introduce an entirely new ideology to the British economy in a single, “mini” swoop.

These were the biggest tax cuts the UK had seen since 1972. Like President Reagan’s “trickledown” economics, Liz was banking on the idea that cutting taxes on the rich would pay for itself in the end.

We’ll never know if she was right, because the execution wiped out the merits. You simply can’t make changes that dramatic without causing panic, especially when the attention of the nation had been very much elsewhere in the days leading up to it.

And fallout there was, within literal minutes. The pound plummeted to its lowest-ever level against the dollar, gilt prices collapsed and global investors scurried in the opposite direction.

The International Monetary Fund issued a rebuke, warning that Liz was undermining the Bank of England’s attempts to tackle inflation at a time when the UK is suffering a cost-of-living emergency.

The Bank of England was meanwhile spinning plates to rescue the economy, stepping in to buy government bonds in an effort to save the pension fund from collapsing.

Then, we found out that mortgage payments for more than five million families in Britain were set to rise an average of £5100 by the end of 2024.

Liz was even responsible for the coining of an exciting new phrase: “moron risk premium”. In other words, the UK was now paying extra to borrow money because its leaders were clearly insane.

Almost a quarter of the mortgage payment rise was said to be a result of this moron premium, which economists predicted would wholly wipe out any benefits that Liz’s tax cuts might have brought.

Had Brits not already been facing a winter of tripled heating costs and inflation on pretty much everything one needs to get through an average day, they might have been willing to ride out the storm. But the UK is still trying to sort itself out after Brexit and has not managed to solidify its new place in the global economy, so all her mistakes were amplified.

I believe the word that’s commonly used for a disaster of this magnitude is “unmitigated”. Liz might have thought she was waiting out the backlash, but the people whose economy she’d single-handedly ruined had already begun the countdown to her political demise.

One of our tabloids went so far as to purchase a lettuce for 60p, stick a blond wig on it and place it on a stand in front of a webcam, posing the question to its readers: can Liz Truss outlast this vegetable? It turned out she could not, with one MP commenting that it might as well run the country, it couldn’t do much worse.

Simply put, Liz lost the support of a nation mere weeks after asking for it. And if you think presidents often have low approval ratings, wait till you hear where Liz was on the scale. A week before she resigned – before her final days of fire and brimstone began – she was at minus 70%.

I didn’t even know it was possible to get into the negative figures, let alone that far.

She did try to reverse her mistakes, sacking the poor chancellor who’d carried out her instructions and replacing him with a known and trusted face, but not even a complete u-turn on the mini-budget was enough. On Thursday, to the surprise of not a single soul, Liz announced she’d be stepping down.

Quite literally the same morning, rumors began to swill that the Tories were concerned that Boris might have designs on his old position. His allies refused to quell the fuss, commenting only that he was not “saying anything either way” about his plans.

The other political parties immediately began calling for an early election (which is a perfectly normal part of our politics – unlike the United States, the UK is not bound to a set four-year schedule). Unfortunately, there was a problem: the decision to hold an early election rests with the prime minister, and we didn’t have one of those, so it was going to take some gymnastics to make it happen.

Instead, Liz’s party announced they’d be replacing her with a lightning-fast leadership election. This didn’t turn out to be necessary, as someone behind the scenes was clearly applying the thumbscrews to anyone even mildly interested in the job who wasn’t Rishi Sunak.

This even worked on Boris, who announced that he wouldn’t be running, though he made sure to point out that he definitely would have won if he had. Magnanimous of him, I thought.

Will we still have a general election? Will Sunak be any good at the job? Who knows – anything could happen at this point. The only certainty is that the steadiest of hands will be needed at the tiller through the tough times that are inevitably ahead…and I genuinely have no idea if we’ve found some.