After a succession of “implausible scenes” in parliament and No 10, “who will be Liz Truss’s successor? That’s the really big question. Because Brexit, and its chief architect Boris Johnson, have drained the Conservative party of all substance and competence.”
Le Monde
also saw the decision to leave the EU as the ultimate origin of the UK’s current crisis. “Since the referendum, British governments have demonstrated, with ever greater talent, that Brexit only takes the UK further away from the promised land of recovered sovereignty and untrammelled freedom,” wrote Sylvain Kahn.
“‘Take back control!’, they all said. But the British are a very long way from doing that. No other EU member is in such a state … Since Brexit, Britain’s Conservative leaders have worked tirelessly to prove that EU membership was very far from the problem.”
Annette Dittert, the London correspondent for the German public broadcaster
ARD, was another who trained her sights unerringly on the decision to leave. Truss was “now the third Conservative leader, after Theresa May and Boris Johnson, to fail to deliver on Brexit promises”, she noted.
When they look, future historians would find the roots of British politics’ “current insanity” in 2016, Dittert said. “Firstly, because Brexit has damaged the UK economy so lastingly that any extra market uncertainty leads to far greater turbulence than ever before.
“Secondly, because Brexit and the inherent magical thinking of a sovereign UK that can go its own way in the globalised 21st-century world, detached from international developments, marked the beginning of the end of rational thinking on the island.”