The resignation of Liz Truss in the UK: the end of Brexit illusions

History will remember that Liz Truss had the shortest mandate among the 56 prime ministers that the United Kingdom has known in its history. And probably the most unfortunate.

But this is not the most important: if 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s address in London, has become a machine for pulverizing political ambitions, it is because the mission is impossible; whether they are lawless demagogues like Boris Johnson, or the reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher who would have been in the wrong era, like Liz Truss…

Mission impossible, because it consists in making Brexit a success, where the last six years have shown that British voters undoubtedly made the mistake of their lives by voting “yes” in the 2015 referendum. to an ideologically attractive project, “taking back control” according to the slogan of the “Brexiteurs”; but who has difficulty sticking with the reality of the country, and of the world.

Brexit won on a double illusion: that, you remember, of the false slogan on London buses, which promised to reinject into the health system the staggering sums supposed to be paid each week to the European Union.

The other illusion was that of wanting to create a “Singapore-on-the-Thames”, that is to say a deregulated place that would attract capital repelled by the Brussels bureaucracy. The illusion was even greater, because it was based first on a bad reading of the world, and came up against two unforeseen shocks, the Covid and the new cold war – or hot depending on the region.

From then on, the Conservative Prime Ministers strove to make an unrealistic plan work, unable to tell the British “we were wrong”, since it would be their own lies or illusions that would be pointed out.

They therefore have to live with indicators that are all at half mast: the United Kingdom is doing less well than all comparable countries placed in the same circumstances; and there is only one possible explanation: Brexit.

The next Prime Minister will not be more successful if he does not take a realistic turn, not to reintegrate the EU, it will take at least a generation to reverse this break; but at least negotiate relations with the “27” without ideological blinders.

The sinking of Liz Truss will perhaps have the virtue of bringing the Conservatives back to a little more reason. They have already changed the candidacy criteria to make it almost impossible for Boris Johnson to return, that’s already it…

If they needed one more reason to wake up, they have only to read the polls: Labor is 30 points ahead of them, and there would be only 22 Conservatives elected to Parliament if the elections were taking place today. A collective suicide.

While waiting for the rest, we can only take up the expression of King Charles 3 when he received Liz Truss at Buckingham: “dear oh dear”, which could be translated as “oh my god”; even the king is collapsed, that is to say…