While the scale and target of Biden’s promised response is not yet clear, any unilateral move is likely to draw blowback from key allies in the Middle East who worry about sparking a regional war.
Turkey, a key NATO ally, has denounced Israel’s campaign in Gaza, while President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has accused the U.K. and the U.S. of trying to turn the Red Sea into a “sea of blood.”
“Turkey does not want to be drawn into this conflict because it shares a border with Iran,” said Selin Nasi, a visiting fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics. “If the U.S. as its main ally in NATO gets involved in this military conflict directly then Turkey has to choose a side, and that will mean it’s harder to maintain a balanced approach — like it has done with the war in Ukraine.”
The challenge for Biden is how to retaliate without risking escalation by Iran and its partners in the region. Conversely, doing nothing — especially after having said he would avenge the deaths of the three U.S. soldiers — would leave him vulnerable to a charge of weakness from Trump.
“Iran’s leadership probably calculates that the United States will be reticent to fulsomely respond in any manner that would risk escalation of tensions in the Middle East and spark the region-wide [conflict] the Biden administration has admirably tried to prevent the past three months,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former U.S. deputy national intelligence officer.
But the U.S. may have “to undertake a more fulsome response to restore deterrence,” he added.
Jamie Dettmer, Jeremy Van der Haegen and Laura Kayali contributed reporting.
LONDON — A new system of border checks on goods arriving from Europe is expected to force rocketing U.K. food prices even higher as businesses grapple with hundreds of millions of pounds in extra fees.
British business groups last week got sight of the U.K. government’s long-awaited post-Brexit border plans, via a series of consultations. One person in attendance said the proposals will “substantially increase food costs” for consumers from January.
That could spell trouble in a country which imports nearly 30 percent of all its food from the EU, according to 2020 figures from the British Retail Consortium, and where the annual rate of food and drink inflation just hit 19.2 percent — its highest level in 45 years.
Government officials told business reps at one consultation that firms will be hit with £400 million in extra costs as a result of long-deferred new checks at the U.K. border for goods entering from the EU.
Ministers have argued that the full implementation of the new post-Brexit procedures — which will eventually include full digitization of paperwork and a “trusted trader scheme” for major importers in order to reduce border checks — will more than offset these costs in the long-run as they will also be rolled out for imports coming from non-EU countries as well.
Supply-chain disruption caused by the Ukraine war, poor weather and new trade barriers due to Brexit have all been blamed for the U.K.’s surge in food prices.
A member of a major British business group, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that incoming post-Brexit red tape will mean “some producers on the EU side will find it is no longer possible to trade with the U.K.” and that “some small businesses will find themselves shut out.”
“It will add to the costs, and probably inflation, but I think we need to go through this so we can work with the EU to find advantageous improvements,” they said.
“We can’t keep running away from the fact we need to implement our own border checks.”
‘Not business as usual’
Britain has delayed the implementation of full post-Brexit border checks multiple times, while the EU began its own more than two years ago.
The government’s new “target operating model,” published last month, will see the phased implementation of new border and customs checks for EU imports from October.
This will include a new fee that must be paid from January for all goods that are eligible for border checks, including items like chilled meat, dairy products and vegetables.
A new fee will be applied from January for all goods that are eligible for border checks, including items like chilled meat, dairy products and vegetables | Paul Faith/AFP via Getty Images
Each batch of goods that could be subject to checks, even if they are ultimately not chosen by border staff for inspection, will be hit with a fee of between £23 to £43 at inland ports.
The first business figure quoted above said the scale of the new fees came as a surprise, after firms had been previously assured by the government that these costs would be dependent on whether goods had actually been checked.
“[Former minister] Jacob Rees-Mogg said there would be minimal costs. Initially we thought it was business as usual, but it’s not,” they said.
“There were people at this [consultation] saying that this is not a massive increase, but it will substantially increase food costs.”
William Bain, trade expert at the British Chambers of Commerce, said there is a “strong prospect” of higher inflation due to the new Brexit checks.
“EU suppliers may be less willing to trade with British based companies, because of increased costs and paperwork. The costs of imported goods would almost certainly increase,” he said.
But he added: “We knew this day was coming and that inbound controls on goods would be applied. It’s a part of having a functional border and complying with the U.K.’s international commitments.”
Reality check
The U.K. has seen trade flows with the EU disrupted since leaving the bloc’s single market and customs union.
Recent analysis by the Financial Times found that Britain’s goods exports are dropping at a faster rate than in any other G7 country.
Recent figures from the Office for National Statistics meanwhile show that U.K. trade in goods with EU countries fell at a much faster rate than from non-EU countries in January.
Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood told POLITICO that he fears his party will pay a price at the next general election, due to be held by January 2025, if the government does not seek better trading arrangements with the EU.
“There’s certainly a revision across the nation when it comes to Brexit — people are realising that what we have today isn’t what they imagined, whether you voted for Remain or for Brexit,” he said.
“The reality check is that it has become tougher economically to do business with the Continent and quite rightly there’s an expectation that we fix this.”
A government spokesperson said: “The target operating model implements important border controls which will help protect consumers and our environment and assure our trade partners about the quality of our exports.
“It implements these important controls in a way which minimises costs for businesses and prevents delays at the border.”
It was (yet another) bad climate year for our planet — and an even worse one for Europe, according to the EU’s climate change service.
Copernicus’ latest report, published Tuesday, paints a dire picture that is now all too familiar.
Last year was the fifth-warmest on record globally and the second-warmest for Europe, where temperatures have increased by more than twice the global average in the past 30 years.
The Continent also experienced its hottest-ever summer, marked by devastating heat waves and wildfires that destroyed over 800,000 hectares of land and caused a spike in carbon emissions.
Extended droughts hit crop yields, with little hope in sight for a quick recovery. Unusually warm winters might be good for consumer energy bills, but without enough snow to restore rivers’ water supply this winter, farmers fear that the effects of last year’s drought might extend well into 2023.
The combination of adverse weather conditions and the fallout of the war in Ukraine is creating the perfect storm for a global food crisis, with millions of people facing starvation. Prices of staple commodities like wheat and vegetable oils, which had already experienced volatility in previous years, spiked in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though early signs suggest the crunch might be starting to ease.
Here’s Europe’s hot, long, dry 2022 — in eight charts and maps.
The EU wants to slash the amount of packaging waste produced across the bloc, banning everything from mini hotel toiletries to throwaway plastic wrapping around some fresh fruit and vegetables.
The proposal is part of the European Commission’s circular economy package, legislation aimed at slashing waste and reducing emissions to help the bloc reach climate neutrality by 2050.
The new rules include mandatory targets for the amount of recycled materials used in plastic packaging and pushes cafés, shops and hotels to switch to reusable, rather than single-use packaging. It calls for all packaging on the EU market to be recyclable by 2030.
Countries will also be told to set up schemes to increase recycling of bottles and cans: Customers would pay a small additional sum on top of their purchase, which is refunded on the bottle’s return.
Packaging is a “key environmental concern,” the Commission said in its preamble to the new rules. The sector is one of the “main users of virgin materials,” hoovering up 40 percent of plastics and 50 percent of paper, and accounting for 36 percent of municipal solid waste.
In 2020, every EU resident generated nearly 180 kilograms of waste, according to new EU data. Paper and cardboard are the main culprit, accounting for 32.7 million tons in 2020, followed by plastic and glass at about 15 million tons each.
“Without action, the EU would see a further 19 percent increase in packaging waste by 2030, and for plastic packaging waste even a 46 percent increase,” according to the Commission.
But its proposal isn’t going down particularly well. Industry groups have pushed back hard against higher reuse targets in recent weeks, while NGOs are accusing the Commission of bowing to those demands and watering down its proposal.
Here are four key points of contention.
End of single-use
One key element of the Commission’s proposal is a ban on some types of single-use packaging in the hospitality sector — such as disposable plates and cups, sugar packets and other condiments, or mini soaps and shampoos.
Businesses won’t let that happen without a fight.
Ever since a first draft of the new rules leaked last month, they’ve been hammering home the argument that the energy and water needed to clean the reusable packaging would outweigh the environmental benefits of moving away from single-use items.
A ban would “require a full cost analysis of businesses in particular energy, water and operational costs,” hospitality lobby HOTREC argued in an emailed statement, adding that the cost of those assessments shouldn’t fall to the businesses.
The rules also set targets for companies to ensure a certain quantity of products are provided in reusable or refillable packaging. For example, 20 percent of takeaway beverage sales made by a café must be served in reusable packaging or using customers’ own containers by 2030, with the target ramping up to 80 percent in 2040. Beer retailers will have to sell 10 percent of their products in refillable bottles by 2030 and 20 percent by 2040.
That’s another sore point for industry.
The Commission should “look at the full life cycle impact of all packaging products,” according to the European Paper Packaging Alliance lobby. It argues that “scientific evidence shows that recyclable, single-use, paper-based packaging has a lower environmental impact than reusable systems, in takeaway settings as well as in quick service restaurants.”
Recycling concerns
Industry groups also complain that the proposal unfairly favors reusable packaging over recyclable single-use packaging, meaning wasted money on investments in recycling facilities — even though the text seeks to boost recycling in the bloc. There’s a minimum amount of recycled content that must be used in the manufacturing of certain plastic packaging, for example.
“There’s a real concern for the industry — we don’t know which horse to back now, because the policy itself has conflicting goals,” said Ian Ellington, senior vice president at Pepsico and president of EU soft drinks lobby UNESDA. “I think the likely outcome of that is we would pause some of those investments while we figure out what the regulatory framework is really going to be.”
Brussels seems to have listened: The rules proposed on Wednesday lay down lower targets on what percentage of packaging must be reusable.
But now environmental groups are sounding the alarm, saying the EU needs to focus on boosting reusable packaging rather than relying on recycling as the solution.
Campaigners have argued that positive messaging around recycling could be promoting additional consumption — and additional waste. They also point out that the average recycling rate is only 64.4 percent.
In rowing back the reuse targets in its current proposal, the EU executive “seems to have fallen into industry’s false promises on investments on recycling,” Larissa Copello, a policy officer for Zero Waste Europe said in an emailed statement.
Death of marketing
The Commission’s proposal would also ban “superfluous” packaging, like double walls or false bottoms aimed at making products appear to contain more than they do.
That essentially means all packaging should be designed for functionality and to minimize the amount of packaging used.
The idea isn’t going down well with businesses that use distinctive packaging to stand out, such as spirits and perfume manufacturers.
In a letter to the Commission, several lobbies argued the new rules will lead to “standardisation of packaging and have negative competitive repercussions for EU consumers, brands and industry.”
“An awful lot of work goes into presenting your products to the market,” said Adeline Farrelly, secretary-general of the association of European manufacturers of glass containers. “The image of your product, the way it looks and feels is a huge part of the value added product.”
Biodegradable packaging in the crosshairs
Compostable and bio-based packaging manufacturers will also have to abide by new rules, as such products can jam up recycling processes and take a long time to fully biodegrade in certain environments.
The Commission has designated a “very small list of products” that should be designed for composting — tea bags, filter coffee pods, sticky labels attached to fruit and vegetables, and lightweight plastic carrier bags — while the rest should go into recycling.
The compostable packaging industry isn’t happy about that, saying it will seriously hamper their business.
The new rules are still “effectively … a ban, or sort of very tight control of what can be composted and what can’t,” said Jack McKeivor, the director of public affairs for compostable packaging company TIPA.
“Why would investors want to invest in it? Why would customers want to buy this stuff if they can’t use it for its originally designated purpose?” he added.
The move would jeopardize the EU’s “current leadership role in the sector” and “freeze” further research and investments into such products, a coalition of bioplastic companies wrote in a letter.
The Commission’s proposal will now be examined by the European Parliament and EU countries, but faces a rocky road ahead — a number of MEPs have already sent a letter to the Commission echoing industry concerns.
Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
LVIV, Ukraine — Inna missed her father’s funeral.
The grieving 36-year-old Ukrainian lawyer learned of his death as she and her two young daughters — one aged seven, the other five — boarded a flight from Heathrow Airport in London to Poland.
It was at the mist-shrouded railway station at Przemyśl, 16 kilometers from the Poland-Ukraine border, that her plan to pay her graveside respects unraveled, as salvoes of Russian missiles slammed into Ukraine’s power grid, also impacting Inna’s hometown of Vinnytsia.
The barrage on the country’s energy infrastructure — the worst it’s experienced since October 10 — not only threw major cities and small villages into darkness and cold, but it’s also wreaked havoc on Ukraine’s railways, grinding trains to a halt and leaving them powerless at stations.
Away from the front lines of battle, this is what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine looks like — a slight, dignified blond-haired woman, with two young children in tow, trying to mourn her father and reach her 72-year-old mother to comfort her.
Knowing the journey back home would be arduous, Inna had tried to persuade her daughters to stay in Clapham, south London, where the three have been living with an English family for the past six months. “They have been very kind to us,” she explained.
Inna’s studying business administration now. Her daughters are in school. “Six months ago, they knew no English; it was hard at first for them,” she told me. Now, the kids chatter away in English, with the elder explaining her favorite thing to do at school is drawing; and the younger chiming in to announce she loves swimming.
But that calm, predictable life they’ve been living in England seemed far away right now.
The girls had insisted on accompanying their mother to Ukraine because they wanted to see their grandparents … and their cats. “When is the train coming?” the oldest demanded several times.
And as the night drew in, and the cold settled along the crowded platform at Przemyśl’s train station, other flagging, bundled-up kids started asking the same question, while parents — mainly mothers — tried to work out how to complete their journeys across the border.
As they did so and debated their options, a Polish policewoman insisted that smoking wasn’t allowed on the platform, and volunteers wearing orange or yellow vests offered hot tea, apples and fruit juice. Still, there was no sign of the scheduled train, and no information about it either.
While we waited on the platform, through the windows of a small apartment block across the road, Polish families could be seen glued to their television sets — no doubt absorbing the news that a missile had hit a grain silo in a Polish village just 100 kilometers north of Przemyśl.
As the news added to the disquiet among the Ukrainians at the station, the worry became palpable up and down the platform. Daryna, a dark-haired, middle-aged woman, was heading to see her 21-year-old son. “I’ve been living in Scotland with my daughter,” she said. “But he’s studying in Kyiv, and I want to make sure he’s OK.”
Some families are attempting to return to Ukraine to visit or mourn with family, but Russian attacks on the country’s infrastructure left many asking “When is the train coming?” | Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
“Going home now is like being transported from the normal to the abnormal,” she added.
Galina, the director of a small clothing company, was impatient to see her 10-year-old daughter, whom she left in the care of her grandmother in Kyiv while making a quick business trip to Poland. She kept texting them to make sure they were safe, but reassuring replies didn’t assuage her, as both she and the others kept scrolling on social media for news about their hometowns — Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Khmelnytskyi, Zhytomyr, Poltava, Rivne and Lviv, all affected by the nationwide missile bombardment.
My destination, Lviv, was badly impacted by the recent blasts. Several explosions were heard from the city on Tuesday, prompting Mayor Andriy Sadovyi to warn on his Telegram channel that everyone should “stay in shelter!” However, many won’t have received that message, as neither the internet nor the cellular networks were working in parts of the city. Officials said missiles and drones caused severe damage to the power grid and energy infrastructure, despite reports of successful missile interceptions too.
Some 95 kilometers from Przemyśl, Lviv was cold and damp when we arrived shortly after dawn on Wednesday. After giving up on the train, we’d crossed the border by foot and cadged a lift to the city.
As we made our way there, the city was largely without power, the traffic lights weren’t working, and the air raid sirens were clamoring. The only lights we could see were from buildings equipped with generators.
At my hotel, the manager, Andriy, told me it takes 37 gallons of diesel an hour to keep the electricity flowing, but he cautioned the water might not be that hot. “When the all-clear sounds, we will serve breakfast for another hour,” he added helpfully.
By the time I finished breakfast, electric trains were already up and running again in Lviv, less than a day after the city’s generation and transmission infrastructure was hit, and by evening, the lights were on all across the city — yet further testament to Ukrainian resilience, improvisation and refusal to be cowed.
And elsewhere, too, electrical engineers — the new heroes of Ukrainian resistance — managed to patch up the damage to get trains running and homes lit. “We had a blackout yesterday [Tuesday],” friends in Ternopil, a two-hour drive east of Lviv, told me by text. “The whole city was without electricity and water for several hours. But eventually everything returned to normal,” they added.
But with winter approaching and Russia planning to seemingly try to wear down Ukrainian resistance not so much on the battlefield but by targeting its civilian energy and water infrastructure, there are questions about how the country can ride out the pummeling.
In July and August, tens of thousands of Ukrainians who fled overseas started returning home. Manned by a colorful variety of NGOs and charities at the border crossings into Poland, the tent camps thus became largely redundant as the refugee flood leaving Ukraine turned to a trickle, and the tents eventually came down. But now they may well be needed again.
“A lot of Ukrainians will leave if there’s no heat and no electricity,” predicted Inna. She’s now in a quandary, torn between planning for a life in England — if she can get her mother a visa — or seeing her future in Ukraine.
“I was a property lawyer in Odesa, I had a good life, and things were going well. But that’s all lost,” she said, trailing off, lost in her thoughts.
LONDON — Westminster is in turmoil, the U.K. economy is floundering, and Tory MPs are about to pick their fifth prime minister in just over six years.
But in a sign of total normality in this fully-functioning Western democracy, Brits have instead spent much of the past week fixated on a livestream of a head of iceberg lettuce, wearing a wig.
Set up by tabloid the Daily Star, the paper’s newshounds bet big that a 60p supermarket lettuce would outlast Prime Minister Liz Truss, after her fledgling regime was gripped by unprecedented chaos in its first few weeks.
And they were right. Truss finally resigned Thursday, just 44 days into the job, making her the U.K.’s shortest-serving prime minister. The Daily Star broke out the Champagne, declaring: “The Lettuce Outlasted Liz Truss.”
So how did Truss put her salad days behind her, and why did she wilt under the public gaze?
Let POLITICO take you on a whirlwind tour of Truss’ 44-day premiership — but be warned, there are more than a few icebergs ahead.
Smashing the orthodoxy
September 6: It all started so well. After seeing off suave-but-dull rival Rishi Sunak in a rancorous Conservative leadership contest, Truss looked triumphant as she took the reins at No. 10 Downing Street and vowed to “transform Britain into an aspiration nation.” She had good reason to be cheerful, too, vacuuming up support from thousands of grassroots Tory members, getting the key Conservative-backing newspapers on side, and confidently brushing off the fact that the majority of her own Tory MPs had doubts about her competence. What did they know, after all? They’d only worked with Truss in Westminster for the past decade.
September 8: Upon taking office, Truss picked her close friend and neighbor Kwasi Kwarteng as her top finance minister, and immediately tasked him with taking on the stale “orthodoxy” at the Treasury. In a savvy first move, Kwarteng immediately sacked the most senior civil servant in the ministry — a man so clever his name is literally Tom Scholar — and so ensured that outmoded, orthodox qualities like “experience,” “credibility” and “economic literacy” were expunged at just the right time … amid a global economic crisis.
Also September 8: A busy day this one, what with Britain’s longest-reigning monarch dying that same afternoon. As the country mourned Queen Elizabeth II, Truss faced her first big communications test on the job: How to capture the nation’s deep sense of grief? She duly rose to the occasion, ripping up lines painstakingly prepared by career officials to deliver a heartfelt tribute with all the enthusiasm of a Q4 sales report. The country wept, for at least one Liz.
September 23: The queen’s death put normal politics on ice for a couple of weeks. But the pause allowed Team Truss to put the finishing touches on their very own Mona Lisa: the mini-budget. A sleeker, more aerodynamic budget than the normal kind, this mini version did away with tired conventions like “independent fiscal scrutiny by the government’s own watchdog,” and “making the sums add up.” Instead, Truss and Kwarteng pressed ahead with debt-funded tax cuts and a multi-billion pound plan to subsidize energy bills. Kwarteng also showed he retained a populist touch with crowd-pleasing measures such as cutting taxes for the U.K.’s super-rich and removing a cap on bankers’ bonuses, all in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis — before heading off to a Champagne reception with hedge fund bosses to party the night away. Cheers!
Woke markets cancel Truss
September 26: Eek. Then came the backlash. Financial markets — famously stuffed with tofu-munching lefties who hate conservatism and everything it stands for — failed to understand the mini-budget’s genius, while the unruly pound, which probably voted to Remain in the EU, crashed to its lowest-ever level against the U.S. dollar. Kwarteng, sounding a little shaken, promised he would publish all his fully-worked-out sums in, oooh, November? That sound OK?
September 28: The pound’s reign of terror continued, and, as U.K. borrowing costs soared and British pension funds teetered on the brink of collapse, those radical communists at the Bank of England were forced to step in with an unprecedented emergency bond-buying program “to restore market functioning.” Their hippie best mates at the International Monetary Fund also got in on the act, saying Kwarteng’s plans would “likely increase inequality” and urging the government to “re-evaluate” its tax measures. Chill out, guys!
Prime Minister Liz Truss is seen returning to Downing Street | Rob Pinney/Getty Images
October 3: Phew — she made it through to the Tory party conference. Political party conferences, after all, are normally a glorious victory lap for newly-crowned leaders, but Truss again decided to smash the status quo by turning hers into a deeply embarrassing few days of U-turns, backpedaling and noisy Tory infighting. Less than 24 hours after insisting she was sticking by her economic plan, Truss suddenly junked her centerpiece proposal to cut taxes for the rich. Kwarteng admitted the idea had “become a distraction” from the government’s “overriding mission.”
October 4: Indeed, the U-turn allowed the real “overriding mission” of the government — to needlessly piss off its own MPs — to shine through. No sooner had the tax cut been ditched than Truss’ ever-loyal Cabinet ministers were onto their next target, publicly pressuring the PM not to impose a real-terms cut to social security payments. One minister even capped off the day by telling a room full of drunk communications professionals that the government’s own comms strategy was “shit.” And who could argue?
October 10-11: A week after ditching their flagship policy, Truss’ government had another go at calming the still-spooked markets. Kwarteng’s new idea? Bringing forward the publication of his next fiscal plan to a date in no way guaranteed to be, erm, spooky: October 31. The Bank of England loved the cut of his jib, again stepping in with a major market intervention to prevent what it called a “fire sale” of U.K. government bonds. Which sounded worrying.
Actually, we really love the orthodoxy, please come back
October 14: After weeks of economic turmoil, Kwarteng was dragged home from a trip to Washington D.C. so that he could be sacked on the spot while still jet-lagged — a bad day at the office by anyone’s standards. Finally free of a chancellor who had repeatedly defied her by *checks notes* implementing her exact policy wishes to the letter, the PM then ripped up her long-standing pledge to ease taxes on big business, admitting in an epic eight-minute-long press conference that she’d gone “further and faster than markets were expecting.” We’ve all been there. Reaching out to the center of the Tory party, Truss appointed former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt as her new chancellor, shoring up her faltering premiership for a full 36 hours.
October 16: Team Truss’ strenuous efforts to build bridges with her now-mutinous party ramped up another notch over the weekend, as a No. 10 insider branded her former leadership rival and ex-Cabinet colleague Sajid Javid — who had reportedly just been sounded out by Truss’ team itself about the chancellor job — “shit.” It didn’t go down too well with him, or his mates.
October 17: A biggie, as Hunt put a bullet in the entire Truss agenda, live on TV. In an astonishing move, the new finance minister issued a televised statement in which — by his own admission — he ripped up “almost all” the mini-budget pledges the Truss government had announced just a few weeks earlier. Even the energy support plan, clung to by Truss supporters as one of the few remaining positives of her premiership, was to be significantly pared back — although hard-pressed voters should be able to warm themselves this winter by standing near the giant “dumpster fire” that’s been Westminster the past six years. Truss capped another glorious day by avoiding an urgent question in the House of Commons and sending a junior Cabinet minister to reassure angry MPs that the British prime minister was not, in fact, “hiding under a desk.”
October 19: Very much the End Times. A rollercoaster of a day — if rollercoasters only went downhill — as an under-pressure Truss first offered up yet another U-turn, this time on pension payments; then a senior Truss aide was suspended as that clever “shit” quote to the Sunday newspapers got investigated by No. 10; then her home secretary was sacked and posted what was essentially an extended anti-Truss sub-tweet as a resignation letter; and then the government somehow turned a really boring House of Commons vote into a bitter row about “manhandling” its own MPs, as one of them literally cried on live TV. For those watching from abroad — this is why people in the U.K. drink a lot.
October 20: With the game finally up and her authority shot to pieces, Truss bowed to the inevitable and resigned Thursday, reeling off all her achievements in an 89-second statement on the Downing Street steps. Yet all is not lost. Tucked away in a newsroom in London, there’s one little lettuce who never lost hope. And in its still-crisp and delicious center lies the promise of national renewal. We can but dream.
