The contest to see who becomes the next Conservative party leader and thus prime minister was remarkable for its swiftness. As this timeline of events shows, Liz Truss resigned on the afternoon of Thursday and by Monday morning the contest had been settled.

In the end Rishi Sunak managed to avoid a vote of the Conservative party membership (which he lost to Truss less than two months ago) when his rivals Boris Johnson and Penny Mordaunt withdrew their candidacies because they could not reach the high bar of 100 MP support that the party leaders had set for them to be nominated. The party leaders had clearly wanted to avoid putting it to a vote of the party membership, given how disastrous their selection of Truss had been and the likelihood of Johnson winning it this time, and their plan succeeded.

Sunak, apart from having South Asian ethnicity and being a Hindu, seems to be cut from the same cloth as other Conservative party leaders and prime ministers, being wealthy and privileged and having attended an elite private school (Winchester College) and Oxford University and has admitted in the past to socializing with only the wealthy and aristocratic and not having had any friends from outside that class. In addition he is married to a very wealthy woman, the daughter of an Indian billionaire. So he is, apart from his ethnic origins, just like the others in the British oligarchy. Although he is viewed as a safer set of hands to steward the economy than the pitiful Truss, he was once a supporter of Johnson and served as his Chancellor of the Exchequer until his resignation helped to topple Johnson.
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What they share is much more than a right-wing ideology. One commonality is that they both have former leaders (Boris Johnson and Donald Trump) who are lying, egotistical, narcissists. Another is that despite their manifest faults that should in a sane world disqualify them from any leadership position, both ex-leaders seem to be viewed favorably by a vociferous base of the party faithful (Conservative party members in the UK and Republican primary voters in the US). The third is that both party establishments seem to have lost their grip on the party and are now struggling to regain control. The final similarity is that both parties seem to have given up on having any specific agenda or party platform and now seem to be going with whatever the leader says. Recall that in 2020, the Republican party did not even bother to come up with a new platform for their convention, essentially saying that their platform was whatever their nominee Trump said.
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British prime minister Liz Truss resigned today, ending the constant speculation about how long she would last. On October 10th, a tabloid newspaper The Daily Star started running a live stream of a head of lettuce named Lizzie Lettuce with a blond wig above the question, “Will Liz Truss still be Prime Minister within the 10 day shelf-life of a lettuce?”. As it turns out, the contest was not even close, with the lettuce winning at a trot, with Truss having the dubious record of possibly being the shortest serving prime minister who did not die in office, just 45 days.

I must say that while I had been amazed at how quickly Truss had thoroughly botched things up since taking over as prime minister, and expected that she would not last long, her resignation today did surprise me. She had given a pretty vigorous defense in the weekly PMQ session yesterday, defiantly declaring “I am a fighter, not a quitter!” which I thought meant that she was going to try and salvage her premiership.
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The mid-term elections are coming up on November 8th. California allows for early voting and I have already received my ballot along with a thick booklet from the state describing the many ways to vote and also information about all the candidates and the ballot issues, of which there are many. I received another thick booklet about all the issues the pertain to elections in just Monterey County. The second booklet has a sample ballot that I use to check off all my choices before entering them into the actual ballot prior to dropping it off. It is all very efficient and well-organized.

There are helpful guides to get information on the people and ballot issues. One is from the League of Women Voters. Another is from a self-described progressive who lives in Monterey giving his recommendations.

I live in the tiny town of Del Rey Oaks that is adjacent to the town of Monterey. It has a population of just around 1700 and the number of registered voters is about 1300. As a result, politics is very personalized. Both candidates for mayor have come to my home and talked with me. Two of the three candidates running for the two vacant seats in the city council have already come to my house. In fact the current mayor who is running for re-election sat down in my living room and we chatted for about half an hour about local issues. The next day she emailed me with some information about things that we had talked about.

There is something really quaint about small town politics. While I am sure that the people living here span the range of national politics, those highly charged national issues are out of sight. At least for now.

I have been following coverage of UK politics in the wake of the recent shambles and have been struck by how prime minister Liz Truss seems to have been completely sidelined and that the latest Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt is the person that people are looking to for authoritative answers to government policy questions. In today’s UQ (Urgent Questions) session in parliament, she was mostly absent and it was Hunt who took center stage. Even though one of the questions concerned her sacking of her previous chancellor, it was Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the commons, who had to respond to the question, raising speculations that she was auditioning for Truss’s role. Mordaunt said that Truss could not there due to other urgent commitments, which resulted in raucous laughter.

Truss seems to be so shell-shocked by the strong negative reactions to the policies that she and the previous chancellor Kwasi Kwerteng rushed through, and the strong calls for her to quit, that she seems to have decided to keep as low a profile as possible, making Hunt appear to be the de facto prime minister. Hunt has tried twice before and failed miserably to become party leader and thus prime minister, and now seems to be relishing the power that he has unexpectedly acquired, confidently reversing some of Truss’s policies.

It reminds me of the politics in Sri Lanka where Ranil Wickremesinghe tried on two occasions to become president and lost both times and then lost even his parliamentary seat, along with every member of his party. But then the disgraced outgoing President Rajapaksa and his family maneuvered to get him into the presidency through the back door and now he acts as if he received a sweeping mandate, protecting the Rajapaksa family from any consequences and using draconian anti-terrorist laws to harshly crack down on the leaders of the protests that ousted them.

On Wednesday, the UK parliament has the session known as PMQs (prime minister’s questions) and if Truss is to retain any shred of credibility whatsoever she must attend and put on a strong showing, though she will face a very boisterous crowd.

The British system is one with a strong executive prime minister and so the secondary role that Truss seems to have been reduced to so quickly is quite astonishing.

It appears that schemes are afoot among the UK’s senior Conservative party leaders to try and find a way out of the mess that Liz Truss has created.

Senior Conservatives will this week hold talks on a “rescue mission” that would see the swift removal of Liz Truss as leader, after the new chancellor Jeremy Hunt dramatically tore up her economic package and signalled a new era of austerity.

A group of senior MPs will meet on Monday to discuss the prime minister’s future, with some wanting her to resign within days and others saying she is now “in office but not in control”. Some are threatening to publicly call on Truss to stand down after the implosion of her tax-cutting programme.

In a rearguard action to prop up the prime minister, her cabinet allies tonight warned MPs they would precipitate an election and ensure the Tories were “finished as a party” if they toppled a second leader in just a few months.

However, support for Truss is also evaporating inside the cabinet, with members keeping in close touch with her critics. “She is in the departure lounge now and she knows that,” said a former minister. “It is a case now of whether she takes part in the process and goes to some extent on her own terms, or whether she tries to resist and is forced out.”

It must be remembered that this was an entirely self-inflicted wound. Truss squandered the political capital any new leader comes in with by acting rashly. Truss still has her allies and she has options to try and preserve her position but that might lead to an ugly intra-party war fought in public.
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The spectacular implosion of the Liz Truss premiership continues in the UK. Given that she came into the premiership on September 5th with just a little over two years before she had to face a general election, she seemed to have decided to make her mark quickly and start out with a bang, introducing major changes in the country’s finances almost immediately. The mini-budget she introduced along with her treasury secretary Kwasi Kwarteng on September 23, less than three weeks after taking office (about ten days of which were consumed with the death and funeral of the Queen), was a supply-sider’s wish list with cuts in corporate taxes and the top rate for individuals that would benefit the wealthy, along with cuts in benefits and services that would adversely affect those in the lower income brackets.
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