Convenience Big Store: The Liz Truss experiment is over

14 October, 2022

In the headlines

Liz Truss has sacked Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor as part of a major U-turn on her economic strategy. The PM will hold a press conference later today where she is expected to reverse her pledge to scrap a planned rise in corporation tax. The committee investigating the 2021 US Capitol riots has voted to subpoena Donald Trump, meaning he is legally compelled to testify before Congress. The former president has labelled the committee a "giant scam" and "total BUST", adding that the ruling will "further divide our country which, by the way, is doing very badly". Thirty-nine years after it last produced electricity, Battersea Power Station has reopened today as a luxury leisure and living complex, following a 10-year, £9bn renovation project. Inside are 100 shops and 255 homes, with a six-bedroom penthouse costing £18m.

Behind the headlines

Liz Truss: "no money, no majority and no mandate". Hollie Adams/Getty

The Liz Truss experiment is over

Warren Buffett famously said that "when the tide goes out, you see who is swimming naked". Now that interest rates have risen and the "tide of easy money" has receded, says James Forsyth in The Spectator, the UK has been exposed. Even before the disastrous mini-Budget, the amount the government owed in debt interest alone was over £100bn. This has only worsened, which is "extraordinarily politically painful" because higher interest payments buy nothing: "no new police officers, doctors or hospitals".

To voters, the GDP growth that Liz Truss obsesses over is an entirely "abstract concept" anyway, says Robert Shrimsley in the FT. But a steep rise in mortgage payments, thanks to increasing interest rates, is "frighteningly real". This plays on the nerves of "fractious and frightened" Tory MPs, among whom the mood has turned "mutinous". The reality is that, despite a notional "parliamentary cushion" of 69, Truss has no majority. And the "incontrovertible law of politics" is that whatever their merits, no leader can be effective with "no money, no majority and no mandate".

At this point, Tory MPs fall broadly into "three camps", says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. Optimists pray the market calms down and some unspecified scandal befalls Labour. A second group says a "visibly humbled" Truss could survive – if only as a "prisoner of her party" – so long as she performed some "act of penance" like her expected corporation tax rise. The rest think "it's all over" and want a new leader as soon as possible, to make sure Labour's majority at the next election is closer to 50 seats than 250. Of course, Truss could also give up her entire agenda and stagger on, head of a "pointless" government drained of ideas and political will. "This would be a rare example of a fate worse than political death."

Nature

The winners of the 2022 Small World Photomicrography Competition have been announced. Honourable mentions went to a close-up of an ant by Eugenijus Kavaliauskas; a snap of an anemone larva by Wim van Egmond; and one of some moth eggs by Ye Fei Zhang. Grigorii Timin and Michel Milinkovitch were awarded the top prize for their pic of the embryonic hand of a Madagascar giant day gecko. See the full list here.

From the archives

The discovery of more than 90 "lost recordings" of Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in an attic in Suffolk opens a window to a "bygone era", says BBC News. It's not just the "clipped, formal" voices: the luxury items guests request are also relics of a different time. Ballerina Margot Fonteyn asks for the kind of mask that "skin divers" use for swimming. Movie star Dirk Bogarde asks for John Singer Sargent's "haunting" portrait of the Sitwell family, "pointing out that he could turn it into a tent or a raft if he needed to". And comedian Bob Monkhouse wants a "large colour picture of Marilyn Monroe". Why? "To remind me of what I'm supposed to forget."

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Gone viral

Researchers at a national park in Minnesota once strapped GPS collars to six different wolf packs, monitoring where they roamed over the course of a summer. The results of the 2018 study, which show just how rarely each pack impinged on another's territory, have recently resurfaced on Twitter.

Books

The Queen Mother at Chelsea Flower Show, 1971. Getty

Do Let's Have Another Drink

Gareth Russell's new biography of the Queen Mother is stuffed full of outrageous anecdotes. Because her father, Lord Strathmore, couldn't be bothered to register her birth for six weeks, a fabulously bonkers rumour began circulating that she was really the daughter of a French chef. One conspiracist pointed to her podgy appearance, claiming: "She did look like the daughter of a cook."

The book's title – Do Let's Have Another Drink – comes, of course, from the Queen Mother's legendary drinking habits. Russell recounts a boozy lunch she shared with Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster – and, according to the Queen Mother, a very good pianist. When her equerry came to retrieve her late in the afternoon, he found the worse-for-wear pair belting out a rendition of Lonnie Donegan's My Old Man's a Dustman. "I think my drink was spiked," she later claimed.

Her household staff was also full of gay men. When one crusading homophobe asked her to send a moral message by firing her gay servants, she replied that if she did, she'd have to go self-service. Once, when her regular 7pm gin and tonic failed to appear, she ventured out to the pantry, where she overheard two of her male footmen having a lovers' tiff. She interrupted them with the immortal line: "Would one of you old queens mind getting this old queen a drink?"

Tomorrow's world

Scientists have used stem cells to grow a mini human brain in a lab and taught it to play the 1970s video game Pong. The 800,000-cell entity, known as DishBrain, was hooked up to two-way electrodes that let it know the position of the ball, and picked up the electrical signals it produced in response. "It often missed the ball," says the BBC, but its success rate was far better than random chance. Boffins say the next step is, quite literally, "beer Pong": getting the brain drunk and seeing if its performance worsens.

Quirk of history

In 1934, at the age of 60, Winston Churchill was filmed launching himself headfirst down a waterslide on the French Riviera. In the frothing water created by his submersion, a pair of black swimming trunks can be seen floating away.

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It's a Balenciaga bag styled on a packet of Lay's crisps, which will reportedly go on sale for $1,800. Many have pointed out that this is "approximately 450 times" the price of a typical bag of crisps, says The Cut, but that hasn't stopped fashionistas drooling over the kooky clutch. Frankly, however, they are "not very convincing replicas": there's a "very visible" metal zipper, and since they're made out of leather, they "do not crinkle nearly as loudly or satisfyingly".

Quoted

"When I want a peerage, I shall buy one like an honest man."
Alfred Harmsworth, later 1st Viscount Northcliffe

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