Monday, October 17, 2022
Liz Truss vs. the Lettuce
On October 11th, the leader article in The Economist compared the time of UK prime minister Liz Truss being in control with the shelf-life of a lettuce. Which was a bit surprising, because The Economist is not the most flippant of publications. So it was more in style when the Daily Star put a live stream on YouTube with a photo of Liz Truss and a lettuce, to see whether "Liz Truss can outlast the lettuce". From there the meme spread, all the way to the Washington Post. Even Fortune took it up and explained how British bookies are offering bets on the subject. And from there the meme spread to television.
It is interesting to see a meme being born. It is hard to say how this will develop, but it probably depends on whether Liz Truss actually resigns in the coming days. If she doesn't, the lettuce comparison will probably go away. If she does, the lettuce might even become memorialized on her Wikipedia page. But in the end this is very dark humor, because the reality of things is that the UK is in a deep crisis, and doesn't have an effective government that could do anything about it. Nor does it have effective mechanisms for government change, it is the ruling party that effectively determines when the next general election will be (within a limit, currently until January 2025). Or to cite another meme, "Winter is coming", and it will be a harsh one in Britain.