Imagine, for a moment, becoming haunted by the shadow of a salad vegetable. Not an exciting salad vegetable, like a radish, or even a suggestive salad vegetable, like a courgette. Just a plain old common-or-garden lettuce. Since her historic 49-day tenure as prime minister, Liz Truss’s comparative lettuce has refused to wither. What began as a witty idea in the Economist and then a front-page picture in the Daily Star (“Which will last longer?” the paper asked, as her disastrous mini-budget imploded, “Liz Truss or this lettuce?”), a simile designed for a 24-hour lifespan has turned into something of a lifelong companion. Lettuce Liz is one of those political nicknames, like “Two Jags” Prescott and John “Grey Man” Major, which will not budge. The fit is too snug.
This week, the satirical Left-wing political collective Led by Donkeys followed Truss to a promotional event for her punchily titled new book, 10 Years to Save the West, to Beccles Public Hall in Suffolk, orchestrating a public prank which has so far amassed five million online views. Just as Truss began to gift her inquisitor an endorsement for Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, a banner unfolded in front of the black screen behind her. That pesky lettuce, a familiarly modest, day-old iceberg, with crossed-eyes. Underneath, in bold capitals, the legend: “I crashed the economy.”
Lettuce Liz is by now more than virality. It’s beyond satire. The lettuce has merged seamlessly with the person to form the shape of a political character. Each trip to the big Sainsbury’s in Whitechapel comes replete with its own ready-made bon mots for the vegetable aisle. No Caesar or Niçoise is exempt from a knowing Truss nod. Millions of viewers have tuned into this week’s resurrection of public ridicule by lettuce for a reason. The details are constantly irresistible, the comparison still too lively. For Beccles, Truss was sporting a shade of lettuce green, a stagey costume device even directors at the National would find too literal, one that Led By Donkeys could not possibly have planned for and at which they must have rubbed their hands in glee. Surely some kindly member of the Truss team could advise or pre-warn on the likely outcome of choosing that shade? Perhaps Liz, like the kids of London, was having her own brat summer?
Lettuce Liz is one of those political nicknames, like ‘Two Jags’ Prescott, which will not budge
In Beccles, one of the Led By Donkeys crew was promptly arrested for hanging the banner by a local bobby, on standby for the inane political fracas that have dogged the life of Truss in the wake of her lettuce baptism, the fresh produce insult that will not go away. At this point, things started to look like a scene beamed directly in from The Archers. He was released without charge. Truss’s reaction to the stunt was one of boilerplate, stony-faced humourlessness. Despite the feisty proclamations of her literary output since losing a premiership after six weeks, there is something uniquely deflated about her. Anchorless, without a seat in the Commons, she needs to fight the lettuce harder than ever. Her voice has dropped a register, lost whatever woman-of-the-people pluck that enamoured the shady overlords of Tufton Street enough to select her as their shop-window mannequin.
Truss made a clumsy, passive exit from the Beccles stage, refusing to carry on her promotional duties under the gothic green moon glowering above her. She took to her social media and posted an aggravated rant about free speech, as if the lettuce is now a living being, a nagging chorus figure tracing her every public move. Perhaps this is now how she sees the lettuce? “Imagine if this had been the far-Right?” she raged, as if the burning of a hotel in Rotherham is comparable with the hanging of a vegetable banner at a book reading in a village hall.
Whatever their political slant, there is something about watching a public figure being routinely drubbed by something quite so infantile, and reacting so hopelessly to it, that cannot help but inspire a modicum of sympathy. The only way to kill the lettuce, Liz, is to own it, laugh at it, stop being such a baby about it every time it appears. As Miranda in Sex and The City once reasoned, while being sexually harassed on the street by someone wearing a Blimpie’s outfit, “I’m a lawyer… and he’s a sandwich.” Take the fire out of it. You’re a former prime minister. It’s a lettuce. By this stage, as all of the many political enemies you amass as a leader know, it is only the fact that it still bothers Liz Truss quite so actively that keeps that trusty, companionable and amazingly resilient lettuce immortal.
Paul Flynn is an Evening Standard columnist
