Britain’s PM in her salad days

These are dark days and we must take what slivers of sunlight come our way.

The Economist’s brutal summing up of UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s seven days at the helm of HMS Great Britain before she and her now ex-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng “blew up” her government and sent the markets into a tailspin with their libertarian-friendly mini-budget is one such soggy sliver.

“That is roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce,” the paper said.

Truss’s premiership is hanging by a thread and the UK papers are circling like sharks, with The Daily Star riffing on The Economist and wondering if “Lettuce Liz will romaine”.

Fair do, as the Australians might say ’cos the mini-budget was a misguided rocket, showing, if nothing else, that the PM was perhaps too green for the job.

It was certainly a cress move to propose sweeping but unfunded tax cuts at a time when the UK is staggering into recession.

One wonders if Truss or Kwarteng understood or even cared that the proposed budget would send the markets into an endive. It’s not as if the mini-budget was even very radicchio. Rather it was more of the same thinking that has typified the Tories’ inability to fix the economy. From the country that gave the world the Titanic, the mantra for the past 12 years has been full steam ahead and stuff the icebergs.

The past week has seen portfolio managers and UK pensioners having seizure (salads) as the markets punish the Tories for their lack of rootedness and making a mâche of Britain’s economic prospects.

Truss’s premiership is now hanging by the slimmest of threads as her new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, shreds every one of her proposals. A sorrel week indeed.