Liz Truss and the death of Thatcherism – Oct. 20, 2022

In the last days of Liz Truss’s record-breakingly brief term as Britain’s prime minister, the Daily Star, a tabloid newspaper, ran a competition asking readers to guess which would last longer: a supermarket lettuce head or Truss’s term in office. 

By Wednesday, the bookmakers had cut their odds to 1-2 against Truss, and the Daily Star was demanding Truss’s resignation by picketing the gates of Downing Street with a man dressed as a “wet lettuce” — luminous green body stocking, lettuce leaves affixed to his person, specimen lettuce in one hand, sign saying “Lettuce In” in the other. 

The Daily Star set up a livestream of its lettuce decaying in real time. This dying vegetable was about as interesting as Wednesday’s livestream of Prime Minister’s Questions from the House of Commons, in which Truss could be seen decaying in real time. The previous night, the House of Commons had seen disorder extreme even by the disorderly standards of Westminster.

One of the last remaining elements of the program on which Truss won her office was to restart fracking for shale gas in Britain. The Labour opposition, exploiting the public collapse of her agenda and the Conservatives’ mixed messaging on green energy, had tabled a motion to ban it permanently. 

Truss’s home secretary, Suella Braverman, had resigned on Wednesday afternoon, allegedly after Truss and new Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt asked her to abandon the government’s target numbers for reduced immigration. Braverman became the shortest-serving home secretary in U.K. history (43 days). The fracking vote became an informal no-confidence vote. So many Conservatives rebelled, whether against fracking or the prime minister, that party whips and even a Cabinet minister had to intimidate and even shove members of Parliament into the chamber in order to vote.

“I am f***ing furious, and I don’t give a f*** anymore,” Chief Whip Wendy Morton was heard to say. In this much at least, the House of Commons can still be said to represent the feelings of the British public. Morton resigned late on Wednesday night. Truss resigned on Thursday, admitting the obvious that nothing remained of her plans to set the government and the economy on a new course. She had been in office for only 45 days. The second shortest-serving prime minister, George Canning, lasted for 119 days in 1827. He at least had the excuse of dying from tuberculosis. 

Those who bet on the lettuce are now collecting the green stuff. Britain will have its fifth prime minister in six years, and the next week will be enlivened by further public displays of the Conservatives’ kamikaze vanity. Perhaps Truss underestimated herself on the way out. She really did set Britain’s economy and government on a new course. Unfortunately, it was full steam ahead to disaster. No U.K. government in modern history has collapsed as quickly and damagingly as Truss’s has. Previous governments have taken years to wreck the economy, sink the pound, and trash the City of London’s reputation for trustworthiness. Truss did it in little more than a month. 

Only six weeks ago, Truss was curtsying to Queen Elizabeth II. Now, she is limbering up for a final bob to King Charles III. The collapse has been so rapid that no one cared that when Truss staffed the Cabinet with her friends and allies, it was the first time in U.K. history that not one of the four Great Offices of State (prime minister, chancellor of the Exchequer, home secretary, foreign secretary) was held by a white male. As the Biden presidency has reminded Americans, the empty symbolism of diversity means nothing when the economy is diversifying southward and the voters are crying “Lettuce Out.”

Truss was elected prime minister by the Conservative Party’s membership on Sept. 5. The parliamentary Conservatives had overthrown Johnson earlier in the summer, following a series of damaging leaks in the press about the consumption of alcohol and snacks in No. 10 Downing St. while the rest of the country had been under a series of stringent COVID-19 lockdowns. The sources of the leaks have never been identified, but one of the incriminating photographs, showing Johnson and his staff sunning themselves in the garden of No. 10 Downing St., could only have been taken from No. 11 Downing St., the residence of the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak. 

The hustings for the new prime minister were a circular firing squad, so they made splendid viewing. For six weeks, some of the most unpopular politicians in living memory competed to denounce each other on television — each accusing the other of disgraceful failures for which, given that they all had served in Cabinet positions, all of them were liable. Eventually, with the public convinced that none of these people deserved to be in office, the Conservative MPs in the House of Commons narrowed the field of would-be successors down to two, Sunak and Truss. 

The MPs picked Sunak, by 137 to 113 votes. But the final decision rested with the party membership, not the parliamentary party. The membership is older, less metropolitan, and much more right-wing than the parliamentary representatives. They picked Truss, 57.4% to 42.6%. This was the lowest margin of victory ever recorded in a Conservative runoff. Still, the members knew what they were getting. Truss had been very clear in her campaign.

Truss promised to return the Conservatives to Thatcherite principles of low taxation and small government. To encourage private enterprise and “go for growth,” she would cancel Sunak’s planned rise in the corporation tax and reverse the recent rise in National Insurance rates. She would cancel the “green levy” on energy bills and abandon Johnson’s plans for a “Net Zero” economy. To address Britain’s cost of living crisis, she would press the Bank of England, which sets policy independently of the government, to do more to reduce inflation. She would put a two-year price cap on energy bills, even though Sunak warned that this would cost more than 100 billion pounds. She also said Conservatives should “reject the zero-sum game of identity politics” and “the illiberalism of cancel culture.” 

The Conservative membership took to this bracing hit of Thatcherism like Hunter Biden to his pipe. The party has been in power since 2010, but the governments of Johnson, David Cameron, and Theresa May all rejected libertarian economics and cutting back the state. Since Margaret Thatcher’s fall in 1990, both the Labour and Conservative parties have raised spending on the welfare state and the bureaucracy and raised taxes. Growth has slowed accordingly.