Six Astoundingly Ridiculous Weeks Later, Truss Walks Away

Queen Elizabeth II reigned for seven decades. Liz Truss “reigned” for less than seven weeks.

“I came into office at a time of great economic and international instability,” Truss said Thursday, speaking wistfully, as though last month was 20 years ago.

“I was elected by the Conservative party with a mandate to change this,” she went on, referencing the UK’s cost of living crisis and associated economic uncertainty.

After meekly suggesting that the energy price guarantee was evidence that she “delivered,” Truss defiantly claimed that she and the chancellor she fired last week, “set out a vision for a low-tax, high-growth economy that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit.”

Then, she resigned. Here’s how she put it:

I recognize, though, that given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative party. I have therefore spoken to His Majesty the King, to notify him that I am resigning as leader. There will be a leadership election to be completed within the next week. This will ensure that we remain on a path to deliver on our fiscal plans and maintain our country’s economic stability.

I’ll confess to being astounded at Truss’s capacity to persist in what I can only describe as a parallel universe. There’s no “path” to delivering on “our” fiscal plans, or at least not if “our” is supposed to mean Truss’s plans. Jeremy Hunt threw out her fiscal plan on Monday. Trussonomics is dead. And it’s not going to be resurrected under a new prime minister.

The UK is headed for some version of austerity, and the nation is, unfortunately, condemned to stagflation. The stagflation part isn’t Truss’s fault. But her plan, had it been implemented, might’ve made the situation worse, if it forestalled demand destruction, embedding inflation in the economy and compelling the Bank of England to persist in restrictive policy settings for longer than they otherwise would’ve. We’ll never know. And you can thank markets. Truss’s forced resignation counts as a resounding victory for the bond vigilantes of yore. Left for dead long ago, the vigilantes returned in 2022 amid soaring inflation across advanced economies. Truss’s premiership is their first victim.

As for the UK’s “economic stability,” I’m reminded of Sean Penn’s incredulous response to Billy Bob Thornton in (appropriately) “U-Turn.” In the lurid, and somewhat controversial, film, Thornton plays an unscrupulous mechanic. At one point, he tells Penn’s beset protagonist that he had to perform unauthorized repairs on Penn’s crippled vehicle in order to protect the junkyard’s “reputation.” Penn, exasperated at the transparently fraudulent ploy, exclaims, “What reputation?!”

Truss destroyed the UK’s “economic stability.” Inadvertently, sure. But destroyed, nevertheless. Hers will be remembered as one of the most fraught, ridiculous and hapless tenures in the modern history of developed nation leaders. She was an abject failure. There’s no way around that assessment, and there’s no use in sugarcoating it.

She took no questions on Thursday. And, as she walked away from the podium at No. 10, nobody asked any.