The lesson of the past few years in British politics is that new lows can always be found. Barely three months ago, it seemed there could be nothing less elegant than Boris Johnson’s dignity-aborting exit from Downing Street. That now seems like an exquisite performance of the Royal Ballet. Yesterday was mainly spent watching Jeremy Hunt try to persuade the markets to get back together with the UK, their maddest ex. At some level, it’s slightly adorable that the markets continue trying to make it work with a country that repeatedly demonstrates itself to be a basket case. It’s possible they’re the most hopeless romantics of all.
Quick recap: the prime minister is in special measures. Black Monday’s already taken, so I don’t know how you’d describe yesterday’s lunacy. Crack Monday? The upshot is … Britannia has been rechained. The Britannia unleashed in the mini-budget three weeks ago – only to wreak appalling havoc everywhere from the bond markets to household budgets – has been lassoed by incoming surprise chancellor Jeremy Hunt. Hunt has immediately re-manacled her, then wound 40ft of heavyweight steel chain round her to prevent her threatening public safety again. Fan theory: was Liz Truss Britannia all along?
The prime minister certainly now presents as a captured beast, having spent the entire summer campaigning stridently against the hideous failings of precisely the policies she is now saying are the only thing that make sense. Yet as Hunt outlined the biggest U-turn in modern political history to the Commons yesterday afternoon, Truss flanked him, wearing that sad, faraway smile of a Tory wife standing next to her husband explaining why he’s resigning over a sex scandal. This arguably isn’t the optimal look for a leader.
Earlier, temporarily released from her oubliette, the PM had put out a tweet. “The British people rightly want stability,” this began, “which is why we are addressing the serious challenges we face in worsening economic conditions. We have taken action to …” No, sorry, I haven’t got the strength to reproduce the thing in full. Long story short: she’s pissed down your back, and now she’s telling you it’s raining.
Anyway, on to Hunt, clearly the more operational figure. Many of us will have spent far too long yesterday watching the new chancellor’s already unsettling twitch of slightly opening his eyes in a slightly startled fashion, slightly more often than every five seconds. I really don’t want to think of Jeremy as a chess grandmaster whose moves are being dictated by the markets via vibrating anal beads. But since I have, you must too.
If you’d told any of us this time a week ago that Jeremy Hunt would be chancellor – apparently in the German sense – then we’d have struggled to get our heads round it. I mean, he’s already died in two timelines (once in the 2019 leadership contest and once in the one earlier in the summer). In our new timeline, austerity is both still happening and about to happen all over again. The narrative threads of the current political crisis are now so completely nutso that you have to conclude the Conservative Cinematic Universe has officially entered its multiverse era. Only the true fanboys can explain it.
Of course, the key difference is that the long-term governing party is not on to a winner with this. Whereas Marvel have found a way to almost guarantee money from the notoriously unpredictable movie business, the Conservatives have managed to preside over a period from 2016 in which the UK economy contracted from being 90 % the size of Germany’s to now being just 70%. Eventually the sole remaining business in our economy will be the hipster trade in ironic In Liz We Truss mugs. I don’t know if this was forecast by any of Truss’s wingnut economists, but I guess it’s called growth? (Incidentally, speaking of Liz’s spirit economists and thinktank army, do now settle in for literally decades of them whining that the problem with their ideas was that they weren’t done properly, like communism or Brexit.)
Meanwhile, Westminster convention demands we style Jeremy Hunt as “a safe pair of hands”, even though he was health secretary at the time of a preparedness simulation into what would happen if the UK was hit by a pandemic, and failed to draw many of the necessary lessons. (If you’re watching the past three years on catch-up, I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but that does all turn out to be a bit of a pisser.) Primarily, this should put into perspective quite how unsafe all the rest of the hands are. Take the cabinet. This morning we learned from armed forces minister James Heappey that none of them even realised Truss’s mini-budget had the potential to backfire.
Or take Thérèse Coffey – the actual health secretary – who on Sunday admitted she has illegally shared her own supply of antibiotics with others, in an absolutely disgracefully deranged revelation she seems to have got away with simply because further disgracefully deranged things have happened after it. Has a senior minister blamed Coffey’s attempt to blow up years of public health messaging on “Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine” yet? – an increasingly gross reflex dodge that gets more distasteful as an excuse for any number of our domestic political failings every time they use it.
Clearly the big question, yet a-fricking-gain, is: where now? What now? As predicted at the time, the death of shame in public life that Boris Johnson was allowed to preside over has made it that much easier for those who come after him to act shamelessly themselves. So Truss clings on. Odd that MPs who talked of nothing but “the will of the people” for years are deafeningly quiet on the subject now. The tiny electorate who installed Truss as Tory leader did not represent the will of the people, and getting rid of her will place the next leader a full two removes from the electoral mandate won in 2019.
The governing party has now spent many, many years breaking things at the same time as explaining that only they can fix them. As of yesterday, ordinary people are realising that the calamitous mini-budget and this era-defining U-turn have combined to leave them in the worst of both worlds this winter and well beyond. Incredible that the Conservatives are now apparently looking for a unity candidate – which is a bit like the Sith Order looking for an integrity candidate. Away from these realms of full-spectrum absurdity, it’s possible – just possible – that the nation is beginning to tire of living in the party’s endless psychodrama. Though it goes without saying, of course, that no one would wish to call the matter too early.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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