A petition has been started to stop Liz Truss claiming her ex-PM benefits. And you’d imagine the average Liz Truss fan wouldn’t like people on benefits.
As it stands she will be entitled to claim up to £115,000 from the taxpayer per year. It would make her 50-ish days in the job some of the best paid work ever. When she promised she’d make the UK a high wage economy we didn’t realise she meant just for her.
It’s the Public Duty Costs Allowance (PDCA), which was introduced to assist former prime ministers still in piblic eye. That raises an important question, will we still have Liz Truss in the public sphere? Will she be called up to use her valuable experience? Unless someone needs advice on how to tank the economy and tank it fast, she might not be the go-to girl.
Will she write a book, like David Cameron? It would be a pamphlet.
Surely her best bet would to be on I’m A Celebrity and therefore she can earn her own money.
It seems unfair that someone can claim all of that money when they resigned after 44 days. If it were a normal job, she’d still be on the probationary part of the contract. She wouldn’t even get paid holidays yet.
To do this when the rest of the nation has to deal with a cost of living crisis seems perverse. The only hope is at that at this rate pretty soon everyone will have had a stint at being PM. If we all get £115,000 a year we have a basic income by the backdoor. Imagine if that was the legacy of Liz.
It’s hard to know if this Government is in crisis or if they just enjoy leaving do cake. Another minister has gone. Hot on the heels of Kwasi Kwarteng, who was fired for his mini-budget, we see Home Secretary Suella Braverman leave her post.
Over the past few (what feels like weeks but is) days we have heard of the Hone Secretary disagreeing with the PM on policy. Well make up your mind. Kwasi was sacked for agreeing with Liz Truss, Suella for disagreeing.
Suella was home secretary for only 43 days but by the standards of this administration that’s actually quite a long time. At 43 days at least she got to turn over the page on her wall calendar.
Suella said she was asked to resign after ‘sending an official document from her personal email to a trusted parliamentary colleague as part of policy engagement’. The details are set out in the letter she sent to the PM that Suella tweeted. We’re not sure she was meant to tweet that. With her security record maybe she thought that was how you send it to print.
In the letter she says that she ‘reported her mistake as soon as she realised’, but that stepping down was ‘the right thing to do’. Oooh, nasty. That’s dropping some serious hintage to anyone else who might have recently said sorry for making a mistake. *coughs while saying Liz Truss*
To add context, Suella’s mistake didn’t cause the pound to crash and for mortgages to cost more just at the time when everything else is already flipping expensive.
Ex-Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has been announced as the UK’s new home secretary. So, that’ll be a fun week for him.
Previously on Liz Truss. The UK PM said that she wouldn’t perform a U-turn on her Chancellor’s plan to abolish the 45p tax rate in the mini-budget. That plan was then scrapped but Liz Truss said she wouldn’t change direction on scrapping the increase to corporation tax. Oh, and Kwasi Kwarteng insisted, “I’m not going anywhere,” when questioned in the news. I think that sets it all up nicely.
And now the conclusion.
Liz Truss has sacked Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor. As Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth has been saying, Liz Truss fired Kwasi for carrying out the policies of Liz Truss. It seems strange to blame him. We all remember her setting out her plans in the run up to the Conservative leadership selection.
It’s like when you have a builder come round, look at your extension and say, “I don’t know which cowboy you had doing this,” and you point out it was them!
But, Liz Truss decided Kwasi was not to be trusted with the UK economy. If he was willing to listen to people like Liz Truss, she couldn’t rely on him.
Then came the U-turn on corporation tax (which won’t make us worse than the rest of Europe, here are some figures on that). The rate of U-turning is so impressive if you could hook a generator up to her we wouldn’t need to develop more wind farms, which she would be happy about.
The new Chancellor is Jeremy Hunt, which is bad news for radio broadcasters everywhere. He has the name that you get wrong once and never work again. The only way it could be worse for radio presenters is if the new Heath Secretary was someone called Vassive Magina.
In a tweeted letter to Truss, Kwarteng began: “You have asked me to stand aside as chancellor. I have accepted.” Some people are saying Liz Truss threw Kwasi under the bus but thanks to decades of cutbacks there was never a risk of a bus turning up. He’ll be fine.
Is Kwasi carrying the can? Why doesn’t he use that suitcase they have in Number 10? You can carry bottles in that.
This reshuffle came before Liz Truss held an emergency Downing Street press conference. It was nice to see one of those that didn’t result in us having to avoid the pub and wear a mask for two years.
Did this settle the markets? It’s too early to tell. The markets surely were aware that Kwasi wasn’t the only brain behind the plan and the other author is still in the top job. Plus, once the markets get spooked it’s harder to settle them. If you were upset by someone slapping you on the head with a dead fish and then they U-turned on that policy, you’d still remember that they were willing to trout you up in the first place. Or first plaice. It’s my fault for starting the fish puns.
As everyone takes their side in the Twitter shouting match it is worth remembering that part of the problem here is the way the mini-budget was done. Even if you like the ideas you have to admit the lack of mathematical rigour caused much of this mess. If they had shown their workings we might not be paying through the nose for our variable mortgages.
Now we have a situation where everyone who hated the mini-budget is upset that they tried it and everyone who liked it is upset that they folded.
Labour and the SNP have called for Liz Truss to resign. That’s what people said about Boris Johnson presuming it couldn’t get any worse. Imagine what the next one could be like. It's the same mindset as a Doctor Who troll.
The details of King Charles' coronation are being released and like most traditions in the UK there’s a fair amount of oddness that we would judge if it was another country doing it.
Remember, we’re the country that burns an effigy of someone every year in November. If you saw that happening in the Middle East you’d condemn it as savage but when we do it it’s seen as entertainment for the kids.
During the coronation there will be moments of pageantry. Here are the stages it will go through.
The first stage is “Recognition”. This rite dates back to ancient procedures of the Witan – the supreme council of England in Anglo-Saxon times. I would have assumed that’s where Charles turns up and people say, “Oh, hey, Charles” And that way we know the right person is being made king.
What actually happens is the sovereign turns to show himself "unto the people". He’ll turn east, south, west and north. Despite frantic Googling it has not been confirmed if he must do this with the royal dong out.
The Archbishop of Canterbury will proclaim Charles the "undoubted King". Or he might say something about vaccines or gender just to wind people up, which is what he does a lot these days.
Then we move onto the “Coronation oath”. In this oath the King will promise to reign according to law and exercise justice with mercy. It’s OK though because even if he doesn’t promise that there’s not much he can do. It’s mainly prop work.
The King then kisses a Bible, as inspired by someone who’s away on business and had too many miniatures from the little fridge in the hotel room.
Then get ready for “The anointing”. The sovereign is "anointed, blessed and consecrated" by the Archbishop of Canterbury. That means you can’t install double-glazing on him or change exterior walls. Or maybe that’s when he’s Listed.
The anointing is done with holy oil. If he pays extra it might have a holy happy ended, or am I thinking of the wrong royal?
The archbishop will use a golden eagle-shaped ampulla to pour the oil. That bit sounds like it’s made up but it honestly isn’t. The whole event would fit into an Indiana Jones film.
Traditionally the choir sings the anthem Zadok The Priest as the anointing is carried out but seeing as the theme to this coronation is “Cost of Living Crisis” maybe it will be a short advert for Castrol GTX to bring in some sponsor money.
Under the chair is expected to be the Stone of Destiny. That can happen when you’re nervous sometimes.
Then we move to the “Investiture”. The King will put on a sleeveless white garment called the Colobium Sindonis and then go and try to kiss Hermione Granger. He then puts on the Supertunica, a robe of cloth of gold from Claire’s Accessories.
The King then gets a jewelled sword, golden spurs, armills, the Robe Royal gold cloth, an orb, the coronation ring, the sceptre and the rod and the last one to put something on him before he bucks wins.
Then the crown goes on and the congregation shouts "God Save the King". Save him?! You’d be lucky to find him in there.
For the “Enthroning” he is lifted by the bishops who will be regretting putting that many heavy mental objects on him.
A lot of this seems silly and outdated but if it gives us an extra Bank Holiday it’s all fine with us.
.jpg)
