Liz Truss lasted 45 days as UK prime minister. The Twitter memes are brutal.
UK, hun? What's going on?
Prime Minister Liz Truss has just resigned after being in office for just 45 days — the shortest tenure of any UK PM. The previous record holder, George Canning, died in office after serving 119 days back in 1827. So, yeah. Not great.
ICYMI, it's been a busy (read: chaotic, hellish, highly destructive) 45 days in the UK since Truss entered (and swiftly left) office following Boris Johnson's resignation.
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To bring you up to speed:
Two days after Truss becomes PM, Queen Elizabeth II dies.
Less than one month into the job, Truss introduces radical fiscal policies, which promptly crash the pound, causing it to fall to a historic low.
Truss damages Britain's economic standing on a global level and brings the country to the brink of a recession, and prompting the Bank of England and the IMF to intervene.
Truss then asks Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng to resign, then does a complete U-turn on the entire mini budget. By which point, it's too late to recover the support of her party, who call for her to resign.
On Oct. 20, Truss resigns after 45 days in office, breaking a new record for the shortest tenure of a PM. The UK will soon be onto its third prime minister of 2022. Cool.
For once, we'd love to live through some precedented times.
Following Truss' resignation on Thursday, the memes came rolling in, largely focused on the brevity of her time in office, and the concentrated yet devastating impact of her premiership.
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Liz Truss was outlasted by a lettuce
UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Star began live-streaming a lettuce in the days running up to Truss' resignation in a bid to see which would last longer: Truss as PM or the lettuce. The lettuce won.
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Then came the memes about other longer-lasting items
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No matter how bleak the news cycle, you can always rely on Twitter to deliver. Which is certainly more than can be said of our politicians.
Topics Politics
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
