Liz Truss and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Liz Truss and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
British Prime Minister Liz Truss announces her resignation, outside Number 10 Downing Street, London, Britain October 20, 2022. REUTERS/Henry Nicholls

We talked yesterday about how UK Prime Minister Liz Truss was being hammered politically. Her approval rating was in the single digits; she announced a tax plan that made the national bank have to roll out emergency stimulus; and then she had to fire the treasury secretary and roll back the plan. And yesterday, one of her cabinet ministers resigned with a scathing letter, all while Parliament held what some saw as a vote of confidence in her administration – and it didn’t go well … at all.

Well, on Thursday, she announced that she was resigning from the meat grinder that had become Downing Street during her mere six weeks in office. She said she’d met with King Charles and the leader of a big group of conservatives in Parliament, and they’re hoping to have a new election for a successor underway next week.

To be fair, Truss came in during a politically-challenging period when inflation was on the rise. But her policies seemed to exacerbate, not ease, the problem at hand. Her time as the prime minister marks the shortest ever in the country.

Key comments:

“I am a fighter and not a quitter,” Truss said on Wednesday in response to jeers and criticisms in the House of Commons.

“Given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party,” said Truss in her resignation speech on Thursday. “I have therefore spoken to His Majesty the King to notify him that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative Party.”

“The Tories cannot respond to their latest shambles by yet again simply clicking their fingers and shuffling the people at the top without the consent of the British people,” said Keir Starmer, the leader of Truss’s main opposition party, referring to the closed-election process which elects the leader of the Conservative Party and the new prime minister. “They do not have a mandate to put the country through yet another experiment; Britain is not their personal fiefdom to run how they wish.”

“Bye, bye @trussliz, congrats to lettuce,” tweeted Dmitry Medvedev, a Russian politician and ally to Putin, referencing the Daily Star’s live stream of a head of lettuce to see if it could outlast her term as Prime Minister.