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Uh, anyone in the UK willing-and-able to comment on this?
From my warped, media-driven perspective across the pond, like... it looks something like this.
Boris Johnson is a frighteningly intelligent person who managed to become PM and pull off Brexit, freeing the UK from the placid bureaucratic tyranny of Brussels but also from a variety of economically beneficial arrangements with the continent
During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Boris Johnson ultimately failed to heed Dominic Cummings, turning about-face on a number of lockdown policies which Boris did not, apparently, regard himself as bound by (channeling a lot of U.S. Democrats here)
The economy, predictably, suffers; whether this is due to COVID, Brexit, both, or neither, is a question that will help many economics professors secure tenure
Maybe there is some philandering by someone important in here somewhere? Recollection vague...
A bunch of people resign from positions in Boris' administration
Liz Truss becomes PM
Six weeks later, someone gets manhandled in the Commons over a vote?
Liz Truss resigns as PM
Maybe Boris is coming back?
It's just not clear to me, at all, how Boris managed to get himself removed in the first place; it feels like he was removed for little tiny stupid stuff after massively succeeding on all the issues that genuinely mattered to him and his supporters. He apparently should have heeded Cummings on COVID (and perhaps many other things, too) and it looks like Boris reaped the consequences without actually learning his lesson. But Truss is apparently just wildly incompetent, or maybe she's just catching the blame for what is really Boris' economy?
What's really happening, there. Help me out.
(1) Boris managed to get himself removed due to a series of scandals and blunders; the final scandal that toppled him was just the last straw that broke the camel's back
(2) I don't like Dominic Cummings and have no idea how he seems to have become so popular with "the rationalist community", but at least one thing he did was that he didn't seem to regard himself as bound by the lockdown policies any more than Boris did
(3) Regarding those lockdown policies, what pissed people off was the constant drip of "our leaders don't take this seriously" so while you had pictures of the Queen at her own husband's funeral observing mask and distance protocols so that she was sitting alone at a time of grief, you also had reports coming out of drinks parties being thrown by the Tories with no regard for masks or distancing
(4) The usual Tory party backstabbing and wheeling-dealing went on to find a successor to Boris, and I have to admit, I still have no idea how Liz swung it (her main rival was Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Boris, but Rishi managed some mini-scandals of his own over the fortune he married into)
(5) It wasn't just manhandling over a vote. For whatever reason, some genius (and I don't know if it was Liz herself) managed to turn the vote over Labour's proposed bill to ban fracking into a vote of confidence in the government
(6) Backing up on that a little - Liz becomes prime minister, she installs her own new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, and they do the usual sort of Tory tax-cut budget. Except that this time round, the 'cut taxes on high earners' panics the markets, the pound nosedives, the economy looks even rockier than normal, so Kwasi gets the boot and there's a new Chancellor who immediately reverses all the tax cuts etc. This new guy is a former Minister for Health, one Jeremy Hunt, who managed to make himself so unpopular his name was rhyming slang
(7) Liz and her merry gang are in such chaotic state, that the u-turn on fracking (they made campaign promises in the 2019 election that they were against fracking, then in power now changed their minds that fracking would solve the energy crisis) triggered a Labour attempt to make political gains on this (naturally) so Labour proposed a bill to ban fracking
(8) For whatever reason, it was decided to make this a vote of confidence in the government - losing the vote would mean that a general election would need to be called, at a very bad time because there is no chance that the Tories will win an election if one is called right now
(9) They are such a shambles, they can't even get this right. First, the Whips tell everyone this is a confidence vote, it's a three-line whip (the most serious one) which means everyone has to vote with the government on this one, no voting against or abstaining
(10) The problem is, several Tories including former and current ministers are against fracking, so there's a good chance of rebels anyway
(11) Compounding this comedy of errors, then the current climate minister, one Graham Stuart, tells the House of Commons that this isn't a confidence vote (the spin now coming out is that some unnamed 'junior official' from Downing Street mistakenly told him this)
(12) So now you have the Tory MPs milling around like headless chickens - can they vote as they wish? is there a whip in place? And the whips are yelling at them and everyone else, there are tears (allegedly, going by some reports I'm reading), cursing, shouting, shoving and (allegedly) manhandling i.e. dragging some MP or MPs into the lobby to vote for the government
(13) Despite all this, 40 MPs abstain or don't vote with the government
(14) The Chief Whip and Deputy Chief Whip resigned. And then they un-resigned. The Home Secretary definitely resigned, but she did it via her personal email account which is a technical breach of the rules, and apparently took some swipes at Liz Truss while she did it
(15) Liz is going to fight on. Then she has a little chat with the chairman of The 1922 Committee, which is all the Tory backbench MPs, and decides she is going to resign
(16) It's an entire steaming mess, and everyone is enjoying the hell out of the drama, because it's the best reality TV show currently on
(17) Not forgetting the head of lettuce which lasted longer than Liz did
Dominic Cummings was writing essays in 2014 describing the UK governance system as an omnishambles with a constant stream of daily disasters - he seems vindicated to me, since this govt is an omnishambles with a constant stream of daily disasters.
https://dominiccummings.com/2014/10/30/the-hollow-men-ii-some-reflections-on-westminster-and-whitehall-dysfunction/
The government was a lot less of an omnishambles before Dominic Cummings sabotaged it by fighting a successful referendum campaign based on lies and impossible promises, and then fighting a successful general election campaign on the basis that the failure to deliver these impossible promises was the result of a shadowy cabal of traitors.
Dominic Cummings is 100% to blame for putting Boris Johnson in power despite knowing that he was unsuited for it - Cummings is entirely open that he did know this, that he thought it was worth the risk in order to gain power for himself, and that he was making plans to remove Boris within days of putting him in power so he had an insurance policy in case he was sacked. Words have meanings and Cummings isn't a traitor, but I frequently struggle not to call him one.
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