Given what’s happened since her death on September 8, it would’ve been fitting for Queen Elizabeth II, in her final days, to have said, in an echo of Louis XV, “Après moi, le déluge.” Because it’s taken no time at all, since her passing, for the British ship of state to run aground.
In her last official act, on September 6, the Queen invited Liz Truss to succeed Boris Johnson as PM. Johnson – whose Spectator columns I’d read with enthusiasm for years – had been swept into power in a 2019 election in which the Tories won an 80-seat majority. The mandate: to get Brexit done. Boris got it done – sort of – but otherwise, in many ways, he spectacularly betrayed basic Conservative principles.
Backed by many voters who hoped he’d be a British Trump, Boris did little or nothing to tackle his country’s version of the swamp. On his watch, English police ignored Muslim rape gangs and arrested law-abiding citizens for criticizing Islam online. Boris championed strict COVID lockdown rules and mandatory vaccination, but broke the lockdown himself and then lied about it – a move that was used as an excuse to give him the heave-ho.
What happened? Truss’s own Tories, including her finance minister, resisted her low-tax, free-market agenda from the git-go. She fired her Chancellor of the Exchequer on October 14. She forced her home secretary, Suella Braverman, an advocate of strict immigration curbs, to resign on Wednesday, supposedly over the kind of minor e-mail flub that Hillary Clinton commits a dozen times before breakfast. The Tories’ Chief Whip, Wendy Morton, quit the same day. And then on Thursday, Truss announced that she’d be leaving, too.
On Wednesday and Thursday, one British TV commentator after another expressed absolute astonishment at these developments. A woman on TalkTV said that Westminster was a site of “complete and utter dysfunction.” On GB News, Nigel Farage declared that the Tory Party “is now dead and it needs to be replaced.” Others echoed his verdict, with some adding that Farage himself, founder of UKIP and the Brexit Party, needs to form yet another new party, one that actually represents the low-tax, anti-immigration, pro-Brexit views of most Englishmen living outside of London. The Tories, as podcaster Connor Tomlinson observed, are now “a Blairite institution entirely.”
I can’t pretend to follow all the nuances of British politics: keeping up with them these days is a full-time job. But a long list of Brits whom I respect – Farage included – have characterized the takedown of the Truss government as “a globalist coup.”
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