Brendan O'Neill: Liz Truss and the tyranny of ‘the markets’

Globalist cliques have far too much power over democratic life.

Britain’s chattering classes have a new hobby: mocking Liz Truss for crazily believing there’s such a thing as ‘the establishment’. They have a hearty chortle every time Truss, famously the most shortlived PM in British history, says ‘deep state’ or ‘the blob’. Why’s she always droning on about a ‘so-called establishment’, wonders that most establishment newspaper, the Guardian? Her new book, Ten Years to Save the West, has caused an epidemic of eye-rolling. Once again, ‘up pops Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister’ to moan about the ‘economic establishment’, says one sniffy review.

Mike's Minute: The West is losing to Russia and China

Liz Truss has a book out.

It's what you do when you have been Prime Minister, even though she was only Prime Minister for about three and a half minutes.

Slight digression - I am going to be fascinated to see how they promote Jacinda Ardern's book when it finally arrives.

Matthew Birchall: Out of office

Another week, another British Prime Minister.

Just 44 days into the job, Liz Truss was forced into a humiliating resignation. After the markets balked at her not-so-mini budget, the Economist quipped that her authority had enjoyed “roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce.”

The good people at the Daily Star took the jibe a step further by launching a competition to see if she could survive longer than a 60p iceberg lettuce from Tesco. A webcam streamed the action to all and sundry. The lettuce won.

Oliver Hartwich: Learning from the Truss disaster

Most political careers end in failure, but few politicians fail as spectacularly, or as rapidly, as Liz Truss.

Truss has wrecked more than her own political career since she became British Prime Minister less than two months ago: her personal reputation, her party’s credibility, and the UK’s finances.

The latter is the costliest result of Trussonomics. Rather than borrowing at rates comparable to those enjoyed by Germany or the US, Britain now needs to pay as much as Italy or Greece. That is how markets now perceive Britain’s political risk.

So, what has happened in Britain? And what lessons can New Zealand draw from the Truss disaster?

Brendan O'Neill: Britain is a political wasteland

The Truss premiership was a new low for our democracy.

So Liz Truss is out. After just 44 days her premiership is no more. ‘I’m a fighter, not a quitter’, she said in parliament yesterday, and now she’s quit. Her premiership deserves to live in ignominy. Not necessarily because her blunders were so spectacular – though many of them were – but because of what this strangled-at-birth stint in Downing Street tells us about British politics more broadly. Which is that it’s a wasteland. An ideological void. A dustbowl of ideas. The lack of even the faintest glimmer of leadership material anywhere in the Westminster circus is horrifying to me. Trussism is but a symptom of a wider malady afflicting our political class.

First, her mistakes. Where to start?