It was four years ago today, on October 20, 2022, that Liz Truss stepped down as British Prime Minister, after serving just 49 days in that position. She’s the shortest-serving British Prime Minister on record, having been elected to lead her party by the roughly 170,000 registered and dues-paying members of Britain’s Conservative Party, following Boris Johnson resignation (largely due to “PartyGate,”a media-concocted scandal in which Johnson and members of his government were seen drinking wine and eating cake in the garden at Number 10 Downing Street–their place of work–during the Covid pandemic.)
Truss came out of the gate thundering a return to “real” conservatism, with a Chancellor of the Exchequer (Kwasi Kwarteng) who suggested what was (for Britain) a bold plan to cut taxes and encourage growth. British banks, and the usual suspects, went into orbit, and (to her discredit) Truss sacked Kwarteng on October 14, and appointed long-term Party apparatchik Jeremy Hunt in his place. Six days later, Truss, herself, was gone, replaced by “Fishy Rishi” Sunak, whom she’d defeated in the Prime Ministerial election the month before. Sunak lasted 21 months, until July of 2024, when the Labour Party won a huge victory, encompassing 419 of the 650 seats at issue. The Conservative Party won 121 seats. The Liberal Democrats won 72, and upwards of a dozen parties won the remainder, a few seats at a time. (The Labour Party–for those paying attention–won only 33.7% of the popular vote, in this “landslide” victory.)
Ever since her resignation, four years ago today, after only 49 days in office, Liz Truss has found herself vilified –in the eyes of the Left–second only to Margaret Thatcher, a woman who served eleven years as Britain’s Prime Minister (1979-1990), and who–along with Pope St. John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, saw off the Soviet Union–and who earned the opprobrium of her political opponents through her political acumen, longevity and the exercise of considerable power.
That Truss has become such a bugaboo today only points up how utterly bereft the United Kingdom is of actual, principled, determined leaders. Perhaps there are some, somewhere, but it seems that–if they do exist–they’re not electable. Which is a different story altogether.
Still, in an environment where there’s much discussion, day in and day out, about whether former Prime Ministers should have lifetime round-the-clock security protection after they leave office, I’d like to put in a good word for Liz Truss. She’s often mocked and ridiculed and thought of as not deserving of it, due to her short time in office. Nevertheless, from the amount of kvetching from her successors, from that day until this, in the form of griping about how she set the stage for all Britain’s ills and–over the course of just seven weeks in 2022–sent the economy into a tailspin from which it’s never recovered, I think she must have had–day for day–more influence on the country than any other Prime Minister in history. Good going, girl.
