The Westminster sitcom has a new male lead. Pass the popcorn

For months now, my homeland has doubled as a content-providing streaming service, with a round-the-clock feed of genre-busting programming. There’s been the slapstick comedy of Boris Johnson’s departure from office, not to mention the absurdist farce of his failed return. We have witnessed the solemnity of the Queen’s passing, with its blend of long processionals and even longer queues. We’ve watched the self-immolation of Liz Truss, a prime minister unready for prime-time.

From those pesky ink pots and pens to the mesmerising sight of yellow-vested police outriders slaloming in and out of the London traffic, it’s been pass-the-popcorn viewing. Perhaps we should call it Britflix.

Rishi Sunak gets into his stride during his first Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday.Credit: AP

How ironic that this season of national drama should come on the eve of the latest series of The Crown, a heavily fictionalised version of real events that plays fast and loose with history. Although perhaps that provides us with a useful frame for understanding this current era of British life: a politics based on castles in the air that also relies on questionable interpretations of the past.

The speedy demise of Liz Truss, and the discrediting of Trussonomics, proved the impossibility of running a country based on post-truth politics and post-truth policy. The former prime minister and her ideological soul-mate, the then chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, tried to peddle the fallacy that mammoth unfunded tax cuts would spur higher economic growth. But their mini-budget never survived its first brush with reality. Even before Kwarteng had finished delivering his fiscal statement, the pound was nose-diving while government borrowing costs were soaring.

The Truss government was acting as if Britain was a global fiscal superpower – as the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh cleverly observed, this was Reaganomics without the mighty dollar. Alas, currency and bond traders viewed the country more as an economic castaway, which had needlessly cut itself adrift from the giant market across the sea.

And now for something completely different...Credit: AP

The result was a financial iteration of the 1956 Suez crisis when, despite the loss of its empire, Britain made the mistake of thinking it remained a great power. That episode also ended in global humiliation, when US president Dwight D. Eisenhower demanded an immediate halt to Britain’s military operation to seize back control of the Suez Canal from the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Back then, the Americans threatened to wreck Britain’s financial system if the prime minister of the day, Anthony Eden, refused to reverse his decision to invade. This time Britain risked scuppering the UK economy all on its own, as Joe Biden strongly hinted at when he took the unusual step of publicly rebuking Truss’s trickle-down economics.

Not unsurprisingly and not unreasonably, Britain’s national mindset continues to be shaped by the glories of World War II rather than the ignominy of Suez. Unfortunately, however, this nostalgic nationalism, and the inflated sense of self-importance and self-sufficiency that goes with it, has accelerated Britain’s post-imperial decline. It is precisely this kind of wishful thinking, premised on a rose-tinted view of history, that led to Brexit – the root of the present turmoil.

Voters were sold the fantasy that the UK could prosper as a low tax, high growth, regulation-lite economy, even as it denied itself frictionless access to a market that accounted for close to half of its exports. Unhappily, the real-life effects have been plain to see, from the long queues of trucks outside Dover to the Brexit-related red tape ensnaring UK exporters. Divorce from Brussels has made GDP more than 5 per cent smaller than it would have been otherwise and investment 13 per cent lower, according to the Centre for European Reform. Last year alone, UK exports to the EU fell by 13 per cent.

Brexit relied on other national myths: the cherished belief, for instance, that the special relationship with the United States was truly special, and that Washington would quickly serve up a prized trade deal. That proved, of course, to be a turkey. As Liz Truss was forced to concede ahead of her first meeting with US President Joe Biden, negotiations are not expected to commence in the short- or medium-term.

Yet another post-imperial pipe dream was that any shortfall in trade from the continent would be partially defrayed by a boost in commerce with the former colonies that comprise the Commonwealth. However, the much-touted trade deal with Australia, the first negotiated from scratch after Brexit, covers just 1 per of British trade. The comprehensive deal with New Zealand accounts for less than 0.2 per cent.

Brexit may have satisfied an oak-hearted desire to take back control from Brussels, but the result has been economic pain and political chaos at home. Rather than Britannia unchained, the world sees a Britannia unhinged.

Now the Westminster sitcom has a new male lead: Britain’s first prime minister of colour, Rishi Sunak, a racial first that is cause for celebration. I fear the plot-line will stay much the same. Season after season of post-Brexit downturn and disunion.

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