Dress it up how you like, Truss v lettuce is no laughing matter

Liz the Lettuce was projected in lights on to parliament. Picture: Twitter

It will go down as one of the greatest tabloid stunts in history. Inspired by a piece of snark in The Economist, which mentioned that Liz Truss had been in Downing Street for roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce, an enterprising wag at the Daily Star set up a lettuce with a camera and posed the essential question: would it outlast Truss in office?

The tragic answer was yes, it would. After six days in the spotlight, this noble sprout was a little worse for wear, but in far better shape than Truss or the Conservative Party she has now stepped down from leading. Lettuce rejoice.

Inevitably, the lettuce went mega-viral. It was reported by the BBC and all the newspapers. CNN did a segment. France24, Al Jazeera and, of course, Sputnik News all covered it. The former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev twisted the knife on Twitter by congratulating the lettuce. Elon Musk, who knows about these things, deemed it a “pretty good troll”. When Truss’s chaotic 44 days in office have ossified into little more than a pub quiz question, people will still remember the lettuce, which was at one point even projected in lights onto the Houses of Parliament. Truly the endive times.

But what does Truss’s defeat by a common garden green tell us about the state of British politics today? Is it all just a bit of much-needed light releaf? Or does it say something rather troubling about how fundamentally unserious we have become as a nation?

The lettuce was undeniably funny. Watching the little fella celebrate his victory in a wig and sunglasses, a pack of tofu and a Greggs pasty to hand, the national anthem playing . . . you’d need a heart of stone not to crack a smile.

And the puns. So many puns. This little gem of a stunt gave us all an escarole to play, while also putting a much-needed rocket up Downing Street. And just cos we’re all feeling a bit cress-fallen, doesn’t mean we don’t also deserve a bit of a lollo rosso now and then, particularly when things have got this radicchilous. Because what the whole Truss debacle has made clear is that there’s an iceberg right ahead. You don’t have to be a whining romainer to realise Britain’s salad days are most definitely behind us. And she never even said sorrel.

OK, OK, I’ll stop. It’s all very silly. But perhaps gallows humour is the right way to respond to the shambles that has enveloped British politics in the past few weeks, months, years. The lettuce gag succeeded in part because it perfectly captured the clownish, almost slapstick quality of the Truss government. Its inevitable decay drew an amusing parallel to the certain doom faced by Truss and Kwarteng in the wake of their disastrous mini-budget. Maybe the only way to stay sane in the face of Tory self-immolation is to have a dark chuckle and hope that things get better.

I do worry, though, that we’re LOLing our way past the graveyard. If we get the politicians we deserve, then what does it tell us that our media class spends most of its time sharing cabbage memes on Twitter? When do the Benny Hill montages and Suella Braverman sea-shanty riffs start to become a kind of psychic escape valve that enfeebles our democracy? Sometimes it feels like our public sphere today is just Oxford grads who went into journalism posting snarky tweets about less socially desirable Oxford grads who went into politics. It’s cynicism all the way down.

Of course any healthy democracy has a plentiful supply of good satire, which plays a critical role in puncturing egos and keeping politicians honest. You won’t find many Vladimir Putin salad memes in Russia. But at what point is the joke on us? Because laughter, as the novelist Jonathan Coe once wrote, is “not just ineffectual as a form of protest . . . it actually replaces protest”. Perhaps it’s time to tone down the lolz just a bit and focus on the hard graft of making Britain a better country. Otherwise, at some point we’ll probably end up just saying screw it and make the stupid lettuce our next prime minister. Hail caesar.

The Sunday Times