When Princess Anne presented Daniel Craig with the Order of St. Michael and St. George — the same order his character, James Bond, is presented with — all I could think was that right now, we could use 007, Craig, the Princess Royal, St. Michael, St. George, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Henry V and anyone else who can lend a hand to right the RMS Titanic that is otherwise known as the United Kingdom.
With five prime ministers in six years, the Brexit chickens finally came home to roost in the premiership of Liz Truss, a woman who has set the cause of female leadership in Great Britain back to the days of Empress Matilda; a prime minister so incompetent that she is destined to become a verb, as in “The New York Yankees were Liz Trussed in the American League Championship Series against the Houston Astros.” See also, “The New York Yankees went down faster than Liz Truss.”
You know when someone says she will “deliver, deliver, deliver” — ah, the Churchillian eloquence — she won’t. She wasn’t even savvy enough to talk about the people. It was all about the Tory (Conservative) Party. She was the reverse Robin Hood — fleecing the poor to help the rich, then reversing herself and throwing her chancellor of the exchequer under the bus for implementing her policies; the “I just can’t quit you” girl who quit. Nothing about her spelled “leadership.”
Her Lady Jane Grey-defying reign paved the way for rival Rishi Sunak, who predicted the debacle of tax cuts for the rich with nothing in the till to back them and should’ve won the leadership contest after bloviating Boris Johnson, the Donald Trump of the Thames, was ousted but for one perceived flaw. It wasn’t that Sunak was elegant and rich with a non-tax-paying wife who was even richer. No, as “The Daily Show’s” Trevor Noah pointed out in a brilliant, absolutely hilarious bit — Sunak was a tad too tan for some Brits, who apparently failed to see the irony, Noah pointed out, in the plumb line you can draw from the white nationalism of Brexit to Britain now being led by a man descended from a country Britain once ruled over. (Noah later suggested that perhaps some white people fear that people of color will oppress them the way they’ve been oppressed. But I don’t think that’s it at all. I think some white people feel that when minorities advance, they themselves lose. It’s the zero-sum game of power and narcissism that Trump, the narcissist par excellence, fed off of brilliantly.)
It would be all too delicious if it weren’t such a mess with serious consequences for a world careening from war to imperiled democracy to environmental devastation. We can’t afford a weak Britain.
Can Sunak make Britain strong again? So far, he’s made the right moves — keeping key cabinet ministers in place, postponing the so-called Halloween budget and saying no to fracking, thereby steadying the markets.
Although he has little in common with him politically, Sunak has arrived at his Barack Obama moment, that of another groundbreaking man of color called to save his country in crisis. At the time, The Onion, the satirical newspaper, joked that America was screwed up enough finally to be run by a black man.
England is screwed up enough finally to be run by a brown man. “Because of (the Tory Party’s) self-inflicting wounds, Sunak comes to power with almost nothing left to lose,” John C. Hulsman observes in a smart piece for The Hill. President and managing partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a global political-risk consulting firm headquartered in London, Milan and Bavaria, Hulsman thinks Sunak will dispense with the magical thinking of the Johnson period and instead dispense the necessary tough love while governing from the center.
“Despite the very tall odds,” he writes, “look for Sunak to succeed in his new role.”