Last week, Britain’s newly minted (and now newly departing) prime minister, Liz Truss, replaced Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) with Jeremy Hunt, a figure from the soggy Tory Party’s soggy center who was widely seen as “a safe pair of hands.” Hunt’s allies claimed that he would be CEO to Truss’s chairman, and that is how it turned out….

There have, it is true, been stickier moments to become Britain’s prime minister: May 1940, for one, when Winston Churchill took the top job. Nevertheless, however glowingly Boris Johnson may, in his farewell speech, have spoken of his legacy (“foundations that will stand the test of time,” “great solid masonry,” the “path to prosperity” paved, and so on), the reality is that Liz Truss, his successor, has inherited one hell of a mess, politically and economically, and time is already running out for her to fix it…