CEASE AND DESIST

Lettuce Contest Loser Liz Truss Makes Legal Threat to Brit PM for Being Mean About Her Record

She’s demanding that Keir Starmer stop saying she “crashed the economy.”

Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who famously lost a longevity contest with a lettuce, sent a cease and desist letter to current Prime Minister Keir Starmer for criticizing her record on the economy. Truss’s lawyers write in the letter that Starmer harmed her reputation by saying she “crashed the economy,” a claim which they describe as “false and defamatory” and say contributed to her losing her seat as a member of parliament last year, according to The Telegraph. The letter argues that the market meltdown that followed her disastrous mini-budget in October 2022 wasn’t technically a crash because it didn’t lead to a fall in economic output. Truss’s former colleagues in the Conservative Party have previously been scathing about her record—including former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who told parliament last year that he’d tried to warn about what her economic plans “would lead to” during his unsuccessful race against her for the party leadership in 2022. Truss’s tenure in Downing Street ultimately lasted fewer than 50 days, making her the U.K.’s shortest-serving prime minister. As her premiership rapidly unraveled, a British tabloid set up a livestream of lettuce in a wig, with the video asking: “Will Liz Truss outlast this lettuce?” The answer turned out to be no.