“Chaos”: the word is taken up on all the front pages of the British press on Thursday morning, to sum up the nightmarish day before in Westminster where a vote turned into a rat race. For the tabloid The Sun, “the government is collapsing before us” and The Times judges Liz Truss “condemned”.
Weakened within her conservative majority, more unpopular than ever in public opinion, without an economic program after the humiliating renunciation of tax cuts, Liz Truss may assure us that she wants to stay in power, her situation seems to be increasingly more untenable, after the abandonment of its economic program and the departure of two of its principal ministers.
His government now lives by the hour but, after 12 years in power, his party so far seems paralyzed, unable to agree on a successor and refusing to face early elections sending him back to the opposition.
“Liz Truss must leave as soon as possible,” said former Conservative minister David Frost, who previously supported her ardently, in a column at the Daily Telegraph. Like him, more than a dozen Tory parliamentarians are now calling on the Prime Minister to resign.
“His situation is untenable,” Sheryll Murray said on Twitter. “It’s time for her to accept (that she is not up to it) and announce that she is resigning,” added Matt Chorley, another majority MP.
For the Conservatives, the challenge now is to find a successor capable of both rallying the party and inspiring confidence in a country which, beyond the political chaos, is undergoing a major economic and social crisis with inflation which has reached in September 10.1%, a peak in 40 years.
Several names are circulating, such as those of Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt – the minister responsible for relations with Parliament – and even Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister whom she replaced in September.
In the meantime, the Labor opposition continues to prance in the polls and its leader, Keir Starmer, again called on Thursday for the holding of a general election.
The Tories are ‘failing in their basic patriotic duty to keep the British out of their pathetic quarrels’, he said in a speech to the Trades Union Congress (TUC), as many social movements agitate the country in the face of the cost of living crisis.
He warned, however, that given the “damage” caused by the Tories, “it will be really difficult” even with a Labor government.
– “A shame” –
Wednesday, after a question and answer session in Parliament where Liz Truss said she was “fighter” under the attacks and boos of the opposition, the day turned to the Stations of the Cross for the Prime Minister.
Less than a week after the departure of Finance Minister Kwasi Kwarteng, replaced by Jeremy Hunt, the government’s new strongman, it was the very right-wing Interior Minister Suella Braverman who had to leave a government ship at will. water, over growing differences with Liz Truss over immigration, according to British media.
She was replaced by Grant Shapps, a former transport minister under Boris Johnson, in a further gesture of openness to Liz Truss’ ex-opponents in the Downing Street race, Shapps having backed Rishi Sunak.
The evening was then eventful in Parliament where a vote – won by the government – about the lifting of the moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, a polluting technique for exploiting shale gas, visibly turned into a rat race. between conservatives.
Deputies of the majority refused to vote in the direction of the government, in spite of the reprisals to which they expose themselves, Downing Street having expressly asked to respect the instruction of vote.
All these events “are a shame”, this “instability” is “unfair” for the British in the midst of an economic crisis, launched Labor MP Yvette Cooper who asked Thursday morning in Parliament a question about the departure of Ms. Braverman.
