The Lettuce Wins – Liz Truss Resigns

At seven minutes after six in the evening of 20 October, India time, Swarajya contributor Naren Menon tweeted three words: ‘The lettuce wins.’

It was the perfect way to announce to the world that British Prime Minister Liz Truss had resigned after just over a month in office.

The lettuce remark was a reference to a wager run online from the start of the week by a wag. What had the longer shelf-life, it asked – a lettuce, which stays fresh for a week, or Truss?

In the end, the lettuce won. This vegetarian victory marks the vegetative state into which British politics has sunk. It also marks the seriousness of a terrible crisis which grips Europe; a twin crisis made up of soaring inflation plus energy shortages, and ironically brought on by the instigation of a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, by Britain, America, and the rest of the West.

Truss replaced Boris Johnson in September on the general promise of setting things right. Her grand plan, called a ‘mini-budget’, and to be executed by her equally-new finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, included Kejriwal-esque caps on household energy bills and tax cuts.

The plan was doomed from the start, because the economics of it made no sense.

In effect, Truss and Kwarteng wanted to fight inflation by levying a heavy burden on the treasury through the imposition of subsidies, while reducing revenues. That meant a ballooning of the deficit, and, because the treasury didn’t have the money to underwrite these gargantuan subsidies, the printing of more money which would only further spur inflation.

In small words: the solution would worsen the problem instead of solving it!

It was, therefore, no surprise when the markets reacted in horror by nosediving. There was a run on government securities, and most pension funds nearly turned insolvent. The Bank of England, their reserve bank, had to hastily step in and spend more money they didn’t have to stop the bleeding.

This horrendously expensive exercise in damage control led to Kwarteng being ‘drawn and Kwartered’. He had to go. Truss stayed on only because, frankly, no one wanted her job.

Even the opposition Labour Party, which in other times would have been baying for Truss’s blood, was strangely muted.

This is how bad a mess Britain is in. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Home Secretary Suella Braverman made it worse by shooting her mouth off about immigrants. Her dream, she said, was to see a flight sending migrants and asylum seekers to Rwanda. The fact that her own parents are migrants of Indian-origin apparently didn’t matter.

But the worst was yet to come: Braverman told the press that she had reservations about a vital trade deal with India, because Indians were the worse visa ‘over-stayers’.

According to multiple reports, the Indian foreign office went ‘apoplectic’, and said that if Truss didn’t publicly distance herself from Braverman’s insulting statement, the trade deal was off.

This time, the Labour Party didn’t stay quiet (not for moral reasons, but because their electoral fortunes are umbilically linked to the minority-ethnic vote banks of Britain’s inner cities).

Not surprisingly, Braverman, too, had to go, barely weeks after she took office. That makes her the shortest-serving British Home Secretary since 1834.

After that, it was only matter of time before Truss got the chop. As a popular meme doing the rounds of the internet goes, she managed to bury a queen, the Pound, her party, half her senior cabinet, and the country – all in a month!

What, and who, comes next is anyone’s guess. The opposition has demanded fresh general elections. Truss’s Conservative Party says that it will choose a new leader in a week. That means that King Charles will be swearing in his second Prime Minister in as many months. His mother swore in 14. Is that the other record up for grabs?

We don’t know, but if the Prime Ministership has been relocated to the perishables section, then it is a deep hole Britain will have to pull itself out of.

And all the while, Vladimir Putin will be chortling heartily in Moscow, at the ills the West needlessly arrogated upon itself, by starting a proxy conflict he warned them against.