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Lettuce Prey
Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak… together, these Conservatives built a Labour majority.
When her disastrous announcements of unfunded tax cuts in 2022 spooked financial markets, UK Premier Liz Truss was given the political lifespan of a supermarket lettuce. She was forced to resign quickly, and last night, she lost her parliamentary seat. The shortest serving Prime Minister, she still gets a pension and security protection on the basis of her less than two months in office. Other notorious Conservative figures have also been rejected by voters — Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, for instance — while others saw the way the winds were blowing and chose to step down rather than face defeat. Rishi Sunak as the Conservative leader who called this election and then lost it has resigned and a leadership contest will occur soon and the bad news is that his potential replacements are likely to come from the Ultras in his party.
Tempering celebrations of Labour’s landslide victory, are several obvious facts. First and foremost, the Conservatives have left the public sector in ruins, and with it, a massive level of public debt that makes tangible improvement unlikely in the short term. More worrying is the rightward drift of politics, evident not only in the turbulent, internal feuds of the Conservative Party, but in the successful launch of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. The UK election system…
