After Liz Truss’ resignation, what next for the UK? For one thing, a potential return of Boris Johnson.

The news: Whatever else might be said about the tumultuous reign of Liz Truss as Britain’s prime minister, it was certainly record-breaking: Her resignation on Thursday, a mere 45 days after she took office, makes hers the shortest-ever tenure of a British prime minister; the day before, her interior minister resigned after serving in that position for the briefest span in almost two centuries, and the week before, there was the dramatic exit of her finance minister, whose 38-day stint is rivaled (in terms of brevity) in modern times only by a predecessor who died a month after taking office.

Only 45 days — and yet a lot can be said.

In six-and-a-half weeks, Truss, who came to power with the challenge of bringing calm after a summer of scandal, oversaw so many policy U-turns that her government seemed at times to be pirouetting. This at a time when the last thing her country and the rest of Europe needed was more turbulence.

As she acknowledged when she announced her resignation: “I came into office at a time of great economic and international instability. Families and businesses were worried about how to pay their bills, Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine threatens the security of our whole continent, and our country has been held back for too long by low economic growth.”

What she neglected to mention was the unmistakable conclusion that her policies had only fueled the economic fires engulfing her country.

And given Britain’s position as one of the world’s largest economies, and a critical international financial center, the troubles in the U.K. have also created problems for everyone else. As Grid has reported, within weeks of her moving into 10 Downing Street, the British leader’s official residence in London, alarm about what the Truss government was doing spread to global markets and to the International Monetary Fund, the financial backstop for the world’s economic basket cases, which urged Truss to “re-evaluate” her plans.

Now, 45 days after Truss bowed to Queen Elizabeth II in the traditional transfer of power, Great Britain is preparing to welcome its third prime minister in less than two months. And now — speaking of U-turns — the shortlist of potential successors includes the man who left following a storm of scandal: none other than former prime minister Boris Johnson.

Economics: The budget bomb that exploded in Truss’ (and Britain’s) face

Truss’ resignation may — in the short term — restore some semblance of calm to the markets. An irony — given that that was what many had hoped she would bring as prime minister. Ultimately, what brought Truss down can perhaps be best summarized by political consultant James Carville’s famous phrase: It’s the economy, stupid.

Truss came to office with a two-pronged approach to tackle the crisis. Step one, announced immediately after she was appointed prime minister, was a package to shield British households from sudden spikes in their energy bills. With winter approaching, and the war in Ukraine driving food and fuel costs high, Truss said her policies would put a cap on what British households would pay for heating their homes and keeping the lights on.

So far, so straightforward. But then, at the end of September, came what Truss and her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, called the “Growth Plan 2022.” In their telling, the plan would help the country not just withstand the current economic storm but also strengthen it by spurring economic growth. Central to the plan were the biggest set of tax cuts seen in Britain since the 1970s.

The problem was Britain’s fragile economic position at the time. Beyond the fallout from Ukraine, the country was still reckoning with the impact of the covid-19 pandemic, the impact of Brexit and the reworking of its economic relationship with Europe, its biggest trading partner.

Truss and Kwarteng insisted that Growth Plan 2022 would help the country clear these various hurdles. Crucially, however, they never explained how they intended to pay for their policies, nor did they publish an assessment by an independent watchdog that traditionally accompanies such plans.

The markets, and an array of widely respected economists, reacted with confusion, then all-out alarm: They assessed that, taken together with the energy subsidies, the tax cuts simply did not add up. One estimate from a renowned think tank in London suggested that Truss’ plan would necessitate some 60 billion pounds worth of public spending cuts, meaning significant reductions in the budgets that fund key public services — from health to transport and far beyond.

Unable to work out how Truss and Kwarteng would balance the books, investors began to sell the British pound, which plummeted to new lows against the U.S. dollar.

The loudest alarm bells sounded in the bond markets. Governments sell bonds to investors to raise money in order to fund day-to-day business. A properly functioning government bond market is, in other words, foundational to the stability of any modern economy. The Truss-Kwarteng budget led to a crisis in the market for British bonds, driving up the cost of borrowing for the British government and forcing the country’s central bank to step in with what was essentially a 65-billion-pound firefighting plan. But the damage was immediate: As the government’s borrowing costs rose, so did the borrowing costs paid by ordinary Britons to take out mortgages or to refinance existing loans.

The fall in the pound, meanwhile, meant that what Britain imported from the rest of the world was suddenly costlier. This was of particular concern given Britain’s dependence on imports: In 2020, Britain relied on imports for around 46 percent of the food it consumed.

In short order, Truss and her government had made the crisis worse, so much so that Britain’s central bank was forced to issue a warning about a “material risk to UK financial stability.” Translation: The entire financial and economic infrastructure that underpinned the British economy was at risk of collapse.

To calm nerves, the government ultimately had no choice but to mount a series of reversals. First, it chipped away at its tax cut proposals, then Truss fired her finance minister, followed by further policy reversals, until almost everything she had proposed had been scrapped. Even the energy subsidy package was scaled back: Instead of guaranteeing energy prices for ordinary Britons for two years, as she had first proposed, the Truss government said its price cap would expire in April.

The markets have responded positively to the abrupt about-face. As for the underlying economic crises facing the nation, these will pass to a new prime minister.

Politics: The Conservative Party merry-go-round

Politically, the retreat from the growth plan and other measures was meant to steady the ship of state. But the impact of these reversals on Truss’ authority was catastrophic. The exit on Wednesday of her interior minister, who had publicly criticized Truss’ U-turns on tax policy, was read by many in London as a way for Truss to reorient the direction of her government. As became clear on Thursday, it was already too late.

Truss’ missteps would have been hard to weather for any leader — but they were particularly grievous for her because of the way she came to office: thanks to an intraparty rebellion against her predecessor, Johnson. This meant that she did not have the benefit of a direct popular mandate. As she herself acknowledged in her resignation speech: “I was elected by the Conservative Party.”

And that party has been watching with horror as her policies have led to a precipitous drop in public support. Polling in recent weeks has shown that the chaos in Downing Street has significantly boosted the popularity of the opposition Labour Party, which has surged ahead of the Conservatives. Indeed, in the latest surveys, Labour currently enjoys the biggest margin for any U.K. party in a quarter of a century. Were an election to be held today, Labour would almost certainly storm into government, putting scores of Conservative lawmakers out of work.

Truss was supposed to achieve the opposite. Although Johnson led the Conservatives to victory at the last general election in 2019, controversy over lawbreaking social events in Downing Street during the covid-19 pandemic had led Conservative lawmakers to conclude that Johnson had turned into an electoral liability.

By jettisoning him, they had hoped to hold on to power at the next national ballot, which is due to be held no later than January 2025. Now, they must look beyond Truss, who will stay in Downing Street as a caretaker leader until a replacement is chosen. The current plan is to have a quick leadership election: The new Conservative leader — and thus the new British Prime minister — is expected to be in his or her position by the end of this month.

Unsurprisingly, among those on the shortlist of potential successors is Rishi Sunak, once Johnson’s finance minister — and later Truss’ rival in the summer leadership campaign.

Sunak’s position has been strengthened not just by Truss’ exit but by some of the choices she was forced to make in recent weeks: After firing Kwarteng as finance minister, she turned to a prominent Sunak supporter. The same was true when her interior minister left: The replacement came from the Sunak camp. In the contest against Truss, Sunak, although popular with many Conservative lawmakers, struggled to win over ordinary Conservative Party members. He also struggled to shake off the charge that he was an out-of-touch elitist, a former Wall Street financier educated in upper-class institutions, married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire. But the spectacular failure of Truss’ plans could now catapult him into Downing Street.

Another leading candidate to replace Truss: Britain’s defense minister, Ben Wallace. Wallace was seen as a possibility to replace Johnson but declined to run in the last leadership race. He is widely seen within his party as a safe pair of hands, free of bluster or controversy, and is popular with the party’s grassroots workers. Other names doing the rounds in London include Penny Mordaunt, who tried to run for leader over the summer.

But perhaps the most eye-catching name to be floated on Friday morning was the most familiar one: Boris Johnson himself.

Ever since Truss came to power, the former prime minister, known for many things but not his reticence, has been steadfastly silent, keeping out of the news and the political picture as his successor’s government imploded. In fact, he hasn’t been in the U.K. lately: Out of office, he has reportedly been hitting the U.S. speaking circuit and taking time out for a holiday in the Caribbean. Among other things, Johnson owes a publisher the manuscript for a book about William Shakespeare — for which he was given a reported advance of around $500,000 in 2015.

But within hours of her resignation, Johnson’s supporters had already started briefing the British press about the possibility of his return. It was, the Times of London reported, something he was considering as a “matter of national interest.”

This much is clear: It will a chaotic week or 10 days for the Conservative Party, which cannot afford to make a poor choice now. Beyond Britain, European leaders are watching and craving stability from the U.K.; French President Emmanuel Macron’s response to Truss’ resignation was an expression of hope that Britain might “again find stability — that is good for us and good for Europe.”

And no doubt another constituency, closer to 10 Downing Street, will be watching and hoping for stability as well: the occupants of Buckingham Palace.

Truss’ appointment as Britain’s leader was the last public act by Queen Elizabeth II before her passing. The formal installment of her successor will be the first such act by the queen’s son, the newly minted King Charles III. He cannot have imagined he would be doing the honors so soon.

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.