Will Liz Truss Outlast a Lettuce?
By 
After a bruising first six weeks in office, Britain’s still very new Prime Minister Liz Truss is having to bat away repeated questions about her future at No. 10 Downing Street.After serving as a Cabinet minister for more than a decade under three predecessors, Truss took office Sept. 6 at the end of a long leadership campaign to replace Boris Johnson, who had resigned amid a swirl of scandals centered on poor judgment.
But the vast majority of the economic vision that won her support from tens of thousands of grassroots Conservative Party members now lies in tatters.
She fired her first finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, last Friday. Since then, she has had to watch his replacement, Jeremy Hunt — a former leadership rival she appointed to the second most powerful post in government — publicly tear down a series of proposals that she had insisted were critical to Britain’s long-term economic growth prospects. They included cuts to the United Kingdom’s basic rate of tax, after she had already reversed course on tax cuts for Britain’s wealthiest. A planned drop in corporate taxes was junked too, along with plans to keep alcohol prices low and incentivize overseas shoppers to spend money tax-free in Britain.
Perhaps the most politically painful change of direction concerns an energy price cap that Truss promised last month to keep in place for the next two years. It was designed to protect British households from the high costs of gas and electricity required to heat and power their homes, and Truss as recently as last week taunted her political opponents for suggesting that two years was too long of a guarantee. If gas prices rose again precipitously, as they did earlier this year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the British government would be on the hook for what might be billions of pounds in unforeseen price hikes.
It’s almost as if promoting someone who thinks the economy is an ideological game that will do whatever you want it to is fraught with failure.
Not that Labour will actually ever get its shit together enough to take advantage of this.