Please don’t look, it’s just too embarrassing. The utter, A1, copper bottomed clusterfudge that is the British “Conservative” Government at the moment is enough to make a patriot weep.
Having become our third female Prime Minister at the very end of Her late majesty’s reign, Liz Truss has thrown in the towel, 45 days after becoming PM. She smashes Lord Rockingham’s record of 97 days in 1782, but then it was his second Premiership (he’d been PM in 1765/66) and it only ended because the poor chap died. We don’t really count the Duke of Wellington’s second period as PM in 1834, which only lasted 23 days, as he was literally just stepping in as caretaker until Robert Peel got back from Sardinia.
The last few days has also seen the indecently swift end to the first time in the history of this country when none of the four Great Offices of State have been held by a white man. The Great Offices are, Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, and Home Secretary. For a few heady weeks the UK could boast (to those that care about such things) that the PM was a woman (albeit very white), Liz Truss, the Chancelor was Kwasi Kwarteng, of Ghanaian parentage. The Foreign Secretary was (and still is) James Cleverly, of mixed English and Siera Leone parentage and until yesterday the Home Secretary was Suella Braverman, of Indian parentage. In a world where a person’s level of melanin and sexual organs seem to be a prime determinant of worth, this was deemed as highly significant.
The chaotic shenanigans of the Truss premiership (which would have a 1970s Italian government tutting and shaking its head is disapproval) have meant that this deeply PC situation did not last long. Notice I’ve not mentioned such tawdry things as policies. There are some, floating around. In fact, there seem to have been quite a lot, in quick succession.
What does it all mean? Where will it all end? Lord alone knows. It looks very much as if the Labour Party, which thinks there are too many posh white men holding on to power, will win the next election. This would give us Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, a very white Oxford educated lawyer who’s also a Knight of the Realm…
One thing is certain, when you look at the horrible vision of a President who is a crumbling geriatric trying to shake hands with someone who isn’t there or asking repeatedly if a woman who died a month before is in the room, you can console yourself with the thought that he’s not from your party and, it could be worse, you could be in the UK.