With an unlikely war cry of “Lettuce! Lettuce! Lettuce!”, social media users set about the aftermath of Liz Truss’s resignation with gusto. The Daily Star’s live stream of whether a lettuce could outlast her time in office was a strong cue for jokes.
The lettuce pretty much overshadowed everything.
You know you’ve made a mess when the icons of 1990s indie are making puns at your expense.
But while the lettuce loomed large, let us not forget the role that tofu played in ousting Truss’s government.
With apologies to media colleagues currently trying to put together video clips packages, even before Thursday’s developments, people had speculated that “Who was prime minister when Queen Elizabeth II died?” was set to be a pub quiz trivia question for the ages.
Some reflected that her CV would turn out to be pretty short and sharp.
And it turned out there were a lot of different ways that you could slice up the time Truss had been allotted as PM.
Anthony Scaramucci has made comparing things to his short-lived time as Donald Trump’s press secretary almost his entire brand.
But it turns out you don’t necessarily have to rely on American measures of political time any more – the Conservatives have been specialising in their own micro-measures.
She’d even lost the support of the dictionary.
Truss is still technically prime minister until the Conservative party elects a new leader, meaning that direct comparisons with David Blaine’s 44-day stretch suspended in a glass box aren’t statistically accurate. But some people had the real question:
As well as the lettuce, there also appears to be a limited shelf-life for the political stocking-filler book that Keir Starmer referenced at PMQs just Wednesday. He had mockingly asked whether “out by Christmas” was the publishing date or the title of the book about Truss. Some speculated it could become quite the collector’s item.
This tweet, which had aged as well as a lettuce from August would, began to get humorously shared again.
There were, though, implications for the new monarch.
There was also a feeling that somehow, some of the best British traditions just weren’t what they used to be.
We feel sorry for Alan, who had already gone hugely viral with a tweet in the last 24 hours which is now factually inaccurate. His four-month-old son could well be on for living through five chancellors, four home secretaries and three prime ministers by next Friday.
But most of all we feel sorry for George Canning, who was in office for 119 days before dying of tuberculosis, and who just lost the main thing anybody remembers him for.