Liz Truss resignation ends most shambolic premiership in UK history
October 20, 2022
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Ian Bremmer, political scientist and president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, shares insights on global political events.
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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here. Breaking news waits for nobody as I'm in a car on the way to a very early morning flight on the West Coast in the US. But no, Liz Truss has resigned.
We all knew it was coming, but of course, she gets to pick the actual moment of 44 days. Shortest-lived, most shambolic premiership in British history. And I mean, truly coming at a horrible time for the country. The economy is in free fall. Inflation, much worse than in the United States. An energy crunch coming this winter. You thought that the Boris Johnson premiership was bad, and it was certainly clownish. There were lots of scandals. But in terms of policy at least they were much more coherent, if not always correct than Truss' month and a bit.
The big issue, of course, is that she decided to triple down on Brexit. No, we haven't done Brexit well enough. It hasn't really been tried. We haven't focused enough on growth, and so we're going to massively expand every failed policy in the midst of an enormous crisis. We don't have the population or even the Conservative Party behind us. Pretty much every part of her historic effort at an economic and a fiscal policy was defenestrated. That's right, thrown out of a window.
First, the tax cuts on the wealthy and then when her chancellor was forced out, forced to quit, Kwarteng, in also humiliation, but not as much as the prime minister. Let's be clear. It was her plan he was implementing. Jeremy Hunt comes in much more capable and basically undoes every single piece of what she promised she wouldn't U-turn. So a U-turn on a U-turn on a U-turn. They call that a roundabout in the UK. They drive on the wrong side of the road, but nobody gets it done the way Prime Minister Truss had.
We are delighted to see the back of her, of course. No one could possibly be less fit for this job, including the well-feted head of lettuce The Daily Star had been rooting on to outlast the prime minister for over a week now. It was of course a joke at the beginning, but now it's her premiership that gets the last laughs as it were. Likely to be either Rishi Sunak or Penny Mordaunt as the next PM, both Conservative Party challengers for her race that she ended up winning but vastly more competent and capable, more stabilizing in this environment.
The Conservative Party is in its death throes right now. I mean, some 20% approval, and it's just fallen off a cliff since Truss became the premier and it wasn't doing that well before that. But because there's no need for an election anytime soon, the Tories can soldier on. I mean, all of these home secretaries, all of these chancellors, all of these premiers, and then of course, on top of that, the news that we thought was going to be the big news in the UK is the fact that Queen Elizabeth passed away, and there's a new King. Well, it turns out that's old news in UK politics. My thanks to our special relationship that we never refer to it as such anymore across the pond for even for a small period of time making Americans think that is another advanced industrial democracy that can be even more poorly run than the United States.
That's it for me. I hope everyone's well and I'll talk to you all real soon with the next premier.
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