Liz Truss Resigns After Only Weeks as UK Prime Minister
Well, that didn’t take long…
Liz Truss has dramatically resigned as prime minister after just 45 days in the job.
The PM said her successor will be elected in a Tory leadership contest, to be completed in the next week.
Tory MPs urged Ms Truss to go after her government was engulfed by political turmoil, following the ditching of most of her economic policies.
Ms Truss was elected by the Tory membership in September, but she lost authority after a series of U-turns.
In a speech outside Downing Street, Ms Truss said: “I recognise that I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party.”
Ms Truss said she would remain in post until a successor formally takes over as party leader and is appointed prime minister by King Charles III.
Ms Truss – who took office 44 days ago – will become the shortest-serving PM in British history when she stands down.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer called for an immediate general election following Ms Truss’s resignation speech.
Maybe they can replace her with some rocket leavesReport
https://twitter.com/colinpmcquaid/status/1581268144244813825?s=20&t=ZGX5acePAIKqV0vKpwvp9QReport
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When your economic theory can’t deal with your economic reality, going with the theory is a bad idea. Double down in Brexit and you become a laughing footnote in a proud tradition.
Good riddanceReport
How did she double down on Brexit?
She’s losing the Red North on increasing migration higher than pre-Brexit and she pivoted from leveling-UP the economy from London outwards to a Tax-cut for financiers.
If there’s an interesting footnote to Truss it’s that at the moment the electorate went Tory it went LibDem/Conservative.
edit: and by ‘Red North’ I mean the Labor bits that went Blue in the last election.Report
It seems to me like the electorate supported Brexit by a knife’s edge based on border control, fiscal independence, and some basic issues of sovereignty. Truss somehow interpreted that as a desire for neoliberalism on steroids, just with fewer annoying French people involved in the vision. Which I’m pretty sure was a big component of what Brexit was intended to reject.Report
Bingo.Report
Bingo? That’s what we’re saying … Truss doubled down on Neo-Liberlalism *not* Brexiteering.
I mean, I’m open to a political counter (a’la Starmer) that governing during an energy crisis via Ukraine is going to make your path very difficult … but her collapse *within* her party is from her tone-deaf adoption of 90s-00s LibDem/Conservative policies on economics – while still in the middle of an energy crisis via Ukraine.Report
She didn’t need to double down on Brexiteering- that’s the reality piece I was referring to. Running to neoliberal tax policy after Brexit would still have been a disaster even without the fall out from Ukraine or other economic realities.Report
Yeah, and I think this is an odd thing about British leadership elections. The final vote was made by roughly 200,000 Conservative Party members, over half of whom live in London or the South of England. This system does not ensure support in parliament for the leadership — I think Jeremy Corbyn did not have a majority support of Labour in parliament. (Truss did receive 31.5% of the votes of the parliamentary party to go to the final round of voting as the second place candidate)Report
Yeah, it’s going to be a weaker PM who comes out of an intra-party vote in the middle of a govt term since there’s no political mandate that comes from leading the party through an election.
The revelation, if there is one, is just how uncommitted the Conservative leadership is/was to anything resembling Red Toryism that Boris (cynically) embraced. Now, the fact that only Boris was cynical enough to see where the winds are blowing is a problem in general for both Conservatives and Red Tories alike… but that’s a different issue.Report
I think the other part of it is that Boris governed with a strong inner circle that irked other party members and Truss repeated this in developing the mini budget without herself possessing the benefit of a strong popular election mandate.Report
Conservatives in disarray.
Good points.Report
I know of one weird trick — when forming the cabinet, select representatives of different constituencies of the party and engage in consultation in forming major policy initiatives. So weird, it just might work.Report
It’s less to do with the election as the lack of caucus support.
Prime Ministers in a parliamentary democracy don’t have legitimacy in and of themselves, it’s Parliament that is elected and that is what has legitimacy. Prime Ministers are only legitimate to the extent that they have the backing of Parliament.
This is why I’m so against the trend in past decade to make party leaders elected by the membership rather than the party’s caucus. To me it seems like something copied from presidential systems (the US in particular), which is a mistake as presidential democracy is the weaker model.Report
I don’t think this is quite right. BoJo was forced to resign because the economy was in a tailspin and the tax cut announcement put the economy in a further tailspin. Labor is wildly ahead in the polls right now and I don’t think they are going to rock the vote by announcing that they would seek to return to the E.U.Report
My guess is the only way the EU would ever take them back would be at the price of pound sterling, which I can’t imagine any plausible government now or in the pretty far out future agreeing to.Report
An actual successful Brexit requires economic policy and fiscal approaches that are anathema to the neoliberal approach that Tory PMs seem to love of late. She wasn’t going to recover the tailspin by doing what she did in large part because it was ignorant of reality. I also don’t expect the EU to take the UK back even if Labor wins.Report
I think Brexit was a massively stupid, poorly thought out and executed self-own. I don’t see how they undo it though. When the U.K. joined the Common Market (the predecessor to the E.U.) in the 1970s, it was a cross-party issue with a good chunk of both Labour and Tories opposed to the measure including famed socialist Tony Benn.Report
They joined then it was limited to a web of free trade arrangements, not the kind of pooled sovereignty it is aspiring to be now. When you’re a backwards post communist state in eastern Europe anything the EU asks is worth it to become a part of that sweet, sweet German supply chain. But when you’re a fully developed post-industrial economy? Well… I’d have almost certainly voted remain as a cleared eyed acceptance that for a diminished, post imperial power it is probably the lesser of two evils. However I think it is fair to say that for countries like the UK the benefits aren’t so clear cut given the expectations for accepting encroachment on national sovereignty. I’d think they would have to fall a very long way even from this crisis for any talk of trying to go back to be viable.Report
Eh, the UK had a very sweet deal prior to Brexit with their involvement in the EU and it’s because, as you noted, they joined early and were involved from the get go. No way would the EU just let them undo brexit. The UK would be lucky if they can get the Norway deal now.Report
The most pathetic part of Brexit was the notion that they could fall back onto their close Commonwealth relations now, after they collectively decided to snub them in favour of Europe in the 1960s.
That ship sailed, other arrangements were made and it can’t be undone no matter what CANZUK schemes the network of party operatives that circulates between the Aussie Liberals, CPC and Tories dream up with on a napkin.
In the EU, out of the EU, the UK is still about the size of France in the European continent. Being in the EU gave them a lot more relevance than they realized.Report
If the UK was a young, highly dynamic, rising power I think you could make a forward looking case for Brexit. Being the really big, independent Singapore off the coast of Europe could maybe work. The problem is that the UK is actually a greying power that has gone through a significant relative decline, but where it’s citizens are used to a certain standard of living. And really it’s the backward looking vision that carried Brexit, where they got to have their cake and eat it too, which was never remotely realistic.
The better path for them was to be a big, important member of a larger bloc that due to its history and language still punches well above its weight culturally and to a degree militarily. They’ve set themselves up for a pretty rude awakening that may only be beginning.Report
The UK could at least be the New York state of Europe in the EU. I have no idea what it can be outside the EU but its definitely not the leader of an Anglosphere.Report
Oh yea, there’s no undoing it in the sense of going back to the prior status quo. That’s what I mean when I say things would have to get way, way worse for the UK to even consider it given the kind of concessions they’d be forced to make.Report
Lexit, the idea that by leaving the EU you could turn the United Kingdom into a socialist paradise, is really dumb. The only economic future the United Kingdom had after Lexit was a as tourist destination, entertainment provider, and colder offshore tax shelter.Report
This thread demands more lettuce jokes!!!Report
Give it time, these comments are only the tip of the iceberg.Report
Well, only if the UK had voted Romaine instead of leaf…Report
Come on you rocket manReport
I’ve seen a couple of predictions based on polling that if a general election were held today, Labour would win an absolute majority of seats and the Scottish National Party would become the loyal opposition. I would pay to watch Ian Blackford as head of the opposition at PM’s questions.Report
Given how complete the Conservative failure has been, the party going the way of the Lib Dems would be more than fair.Report
The commentariat seems extremely ill-informed.
44 days was a pittance, in comparison to the pain she withstood to gift us this government.
Alas, old Bess, you died too soon.Report