Good morning, weary reader, and rest assured: nobody’s resigned from anything since you went to bed, so far as I can tell. They didn’t need to. George Canning, the shortest serving prime minister in British history until yesterday, had his period in office finished off by a deadly bout of pneumonia. For Liz Truss, the end was brought about by a total systems collapse.
There wasn’t anything very dramatic about Truss’s exit, in the end: her resignation speech was 200 words long, and excruciatingly shorn of the usual banalities of pride, success, or paeans to Britain’s limitless future. Any of that would have felt hopelessly out of key. She walked out of No 10, spoke for 90 seconds, and walked in again. And that was that. I found I felt almost nothing at all. If you’re similarly numb, it’s worth reminding yourself: this is a staggering, and vastly consequential, moment, and the country – and the Tories – are in crisis.
