A country called Sevco

When leaders become comical, they’re usually finished.

British Prime Minister Liz Truss is hilarious.

Today she sacked her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng and replaced him with the unfortunately named Jeremy Hunt.

That’s four in that high office of state since July.

By contrast, this state has had FIVE finance ministers since 1997.

His resignation letter clearly put it right back at his boss.

“However, your vision of optimism, growth and change was right.”

So, he implemented HER plan, and the currency tanked.

He wasn’t dragged out of  Number Eleven screaming, but he was setting the record straight as felt the wheels of the big red bus on top of him.

Both these characters are where they are because of Brexit.

Truss was a Remainer, but her personal ambition was always going to trump any such trifling matters.

It is crushingly apparent that she is out of her depth.

Just look at this presser today.

Ambition did get her to Number Ten.

However, it will not make her competent in the job.

After the Brexit vote in 2016, I wrote there that it would be a slow-moving Suez crisis.

The Brexiteers gushed about Empire 2.0 as they fantasised about life outside of the biggest trading block in the world.

It was, in large part, an emotional vote to regain imperial greatness, there was more than a little xenophobia.

Take Back Control sounded to many in Brits as the restoration of an all-white motherland that ruled over lesser breeds.

It was a campaign strategy based on the sentiments of the  Famine Song.

Sadly, it worked.

It is worth remembering that in the Suez Crisis in 1956, President Eisenhower didn’t send in the Marines to put manners on the Brits he merely squeezed the Pound Sterling.

It worked.

Now it is reported that Tory MPs and party grandees will be busy this weekend planning for the removal of the Prime Minister.

This is where the back-of-an-envelope British constitution is found wanting.

Liz Truss got the keys to Number Ten on the back of around 80,000 votes.

Now her tenure could be terminated by perhaps as few as a couple of hundred inhabitants of the Westminster village.

Actually, there was no envelope.

Brexit has revealed just how archaic and chaotic the British system of government actually is, and it is unravelling at a pace.

This piece by Tom McTague in the Atlantic is worth your time.

It’s behind a paywall, so here is the first paragraph to give you a flavour:

For the first time in my adult life, there is a genuine sense of decay in Britain—a realization that something has been lost that will be difficult to recover, something more profound than pounds and pence, political personalities, or even prime ministers. Over the past three weeks, the U.K. has been gripped by a crisis of crushing stupidity, one that has gone beyond all the turmoil of Brexit, Boris, even the great bank bailouts of 2007, and touched that most precious of things: core national credibility.

He concludes:

We are now almost 15 years past the seismic financial crisis of 2008 and on to our fifth prime minister. Britain was once a rich country, seemingly well governed with institutions that sat like sedimentary rock on its surface, solid and everlasting. Today it is very obviously not a rich country or well governed, but a poor country, badly governed, with weak institutions. In trying to reverse this reality, Truss has made it visible for all to see.

Slow-moving Suez Crisis, anyone?

Dear reader, I find it deeply ironic about free marketeers being undone by the markets.

Only a few weeks ago, the trickle-down economics chaps were buoyant about the new direction.

Oh dear…

This one definitely deserves a red card.

One NUJ colleague that I spoke to in London today said that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was looking at the British situation very closely indeed.

To put that in Planet Fitba terms, that is a bigger mismatch than these two.

If Sevco was a country, it would probably look like Britain today.

Starting to see it now?