On 6 September 2022, Liz Truss took over the reins of prime minister of the United Kingdom from Boris Johnson, who departed from Number 10 Downing Street in disgrace. He finally resigned as an MP six months later, dodging a humiliating suspension that would have been imposed upon him, had he remained in parliament.
The madness of Liz Truss
Truss’s premiership was even more short-lived and dramatic, when her mini-budget, which had not been discussed with the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR), sent sterling into freefall across global markets. She sacked her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and when that failed to put any brake upon the situation, resigned on 25 October, making her the shortest-serving British prime minister in history.
Since then, the New Statesman reports, she has blamed, among others, the OBR, the Supreme Court, the Judicial Appointments Committee, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, the Human Rights Act, and national insurance. She takes no responsibility herself.
She even wrote a book about her premiership called Ten Years to Save the West. The Guardian reviewer evaluated it as: “One of the most shamelessly unrepentant, petulant, politically and economically jejune and cliche-ridden books…” And concluded: “The extent of her ignorance is astounding.”
The only places she is listened to, in fact, are right-wing political conferences in the US, where she proposes that Britain is run by an “unelected bureaucracy”, which has a striking similarity to the claims set out by Project 2025 about the US. However, in Britain, several MPs who espoused Project 2025’s sister philosophy, National Conservatism, including its leader, Yorkshire MP Miriam Cates, lost their parliamentary seats in the 2024 election.
Of Trump, Truss and unicorns
There are many parallels that can be drawn between Truss’s chaotic premiership and Donald Trump’s torrent of executive orders in his first hundred days as US president. Many of these have shocked and amazed American citizens, from Elon Musk’s Doge to threats against Canada, Mexico and the EU, and the harrying of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. Other nations are beginning to consider how they will orient to a new world order which no longer looks to America to lead its defence strategies or its financial markets.
The world will no doubt be in flux for quite some time to come. And while we wait for a new normal to evolve, one of the most interesting questions to consider, most particularly on National Unicorn Day, is why the UK’s response to Truss and the US’s response to Trump were so very different.
There might have been some reason to believe it should have worked out differently – Britain still retains the unicorn of royalty after all. But our monarchs have no hard power. We expect them to stay within our national storybook and only come out for the splashes of colourful pageantry that whole world enjoys. In everyday life, British people frequently exert a level of cynicism that surprises the rest of the world.
The magic of British cynicism
In 2020, Lale Arikoglu reflected upon a 2003 incident that laid bare the cynicism of the British public, in their response to the American magician/illusionist David Blaine. Fresh from leaving US audiences ‘awestruck’ by public stunts such as burying himself alive and spending 72 hours in a block of ice, Blaine decided to suspend himself above the River Thames in a small Perspex box for 44 days. The response he got shocked him, and bemused the rest of the world.
After a few days, crowds arrived to throw eggs and, most nights, people turned up to play loud music and shine flashlights to prevent him from sleeping. A parade of men mooned (bared their bottoms) at him, and others drove golf balls at the box. Tabloid press conspiracy theories suggested that he was a hologram, giving rise to even more elaborate ‘tests’ of his reality, one of which involved a tabloid newspaper deploying a remote-controlled helicopter to swing hamburgers in front of the hapless, fasting illusionist.
At the end of the experience, Blaine seemed deflated and disillusioned, admitting that he had no idea why the British public had responded in this way.
Heaven knows, I’m miserable now
In 2015, sociologist Kieran Curran proposed: “Transcending barriers between high and low culture, the cynic sensibility permeates [British] 20th-century culture as a whole, in both popular and relatively unpopular variants…. from Philip Larkin… to Morrissey.”
It does seem fair to suggest that cynicism is probably the linking factor between Larkin’s poem This Be The Verse which starts: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” and Morrissey’s song which says: “I was looking for a job and then I found a job / And Heaven knows, I’m miserable now.”
British cynicism has been alternately analysed as a national character faultline. But if it protects us from the likes of Trump and Truss, is it really?
“A load of old bollocks”
As the world swirls around the plughole of Trump’s stock market crash, we are not short of British commentators who are happy to send a similarly cynical message to the US. Leading the field is ex-Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, dubbing Trump’s tariff impositions as “complete nonsense” and, yes, that, “everything the President says is a load of old bollocks”.
Alan Sugar, presenter of the British Apprentice reality show, calls Trump’s policy, “malarkey… which will be cancelled because it simply won’t work”, and expresses doubt because there is no negotiation with someone who “believes his own propaganda and slogans”.
Ex-Tony Blair chief press officer Alistair Campbell accuses Trump of “lying on an industrial scale”, adding, “Trump never stopped being a reality show host – that’s where he gets his kicks”, and that his inner circle pussyfoot around him, “pre-empting his madness”.
In the 2003 film Love, Actually, Hugh Grant’s fictional PM haltingly informs Billy Bob Thornton’s fictional US president that he has seen through his weasel words and that things are going to change from now on. Might we see this echoed in real life in the near future, as the British public run out of patience with inflated American illusions, as they did in a more minor way with illusionist Blaine?
If we’re kind and polite…
I have to admit that I have no idea where and when the current global emergency is going to end. But after a long period of despairing about the idiocy of Brexit and all that came after, I have realised that I’m glad I was born in the nation that spawned Monty Python and the (Never Mind The Bollocks) Sex Pistols, and that deftly dispatched the heads of bollocks purveyors Charles (divine right of kings) I and Oliver (bans Christmas celebrations) Cromwell in quick succession, without fear or favour – Cromwell’s execution being post-mortem, just to underline how important it is to Brits to issue ‘a bollocking.’
And, that we recently added to our national story book on Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee by depicting her having tea with Paddington Bear, the type of open, honest illusion that all can enjoy. And, of course, espouse Paddington creator Michael Bond’s philosophy, as voiced through his fictional character: “If we’re kind and polite, the world will be right.”
Unicorns are magnificent creatures in story books, after all. But they do tend to cause havoc amongst bulls and bears in stock markets.
We’re still your friends, America. But perhaps now, we could introduce you to the very British concept of “I call bollocks?” It might save the world a lot of heartbreak, going forward.
