Everyone just a joke about iceberg lettuce

We haven't heard so many salad jokes in a long time. The British tabloid "Daily Star" is to blame for this, which on Friday a week ago bundled Liz Truss' chances of survival as Prime Minister in the question: "Which soggy salad lasts longer?" The cover photo also showed the head of the Tory boss next to one iceberg lettuce

The street poetic charm of this headline can hardly be translated into German: "Wet Lettuce" is a term used in northern English slang to insult soft-spoken losers. By Thursday it was clear that the salad had won. Liz Truss resigned and is now listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the shortest prime minister in office: 44 days.

After all, she managed to shake hands with two British monarchs during this time. The last prime minister to do so was Winston Churchill. However, Liz Truss never had a fair chance. Her opponent wasn't just any lettuce, but an iceberg lettuce. Anyone who's bitten into these things knows that you could eat the cellophane they're wrapped in without noticing the difference.

Iceberg lettuce isn't a rotting vegetable at all, it's plastic waste from the English Channel that's been mechanically compacted into pale green balls. Something like that can't rot at all. Liz Truss would also have lost this competition if she had stayed in office for four more years.

"The last few days have been really dramatic in London," says MEP David McAllister (CDU) on the resignation of Prime Minister Liz Truss. Britain urgently needs a stable government now. That is also in the interest of the European Union.

Source: WORLD

This will no longer happen. Instead, on Friday there was a serious possibility of a special punchline in the room: Suddenly nobody wanted to rule out Boris Johnson's return to office. That can only be because the Very Hungry Caterpillar has eaten a few bigger holes in the Tories' short-term memory, and they've already forgotten how relieved they were when the man resigned three months ago. Re-electing Johnson as Prime Minister would be a bit like handing General Paulus a whole army again in March 1943 and saying, "Frankly, just try that again with Stalingrad."

Oops, historically sensitive minds will now complain, did we just compare a British prime minister with a Wehrmacht officer? No, of course we don't. And we trust that the humorous Brit will stick with Adorno when in doubt: "Fun is a steel bath." In this context, we recall the hearty headline in the British newspaper "The Mirror" on the semi-finals between England and Germany at the 1996 European Football Championship: " Danger! Surrender! For you Fritz, the Euro 96 Championship is over.” However, it was over again for the English in the penalty shoot-out.

Emmanuel Macron probably had something similar in mind to the 1996 “Mirror” when he declared at the start of the EU summit in Brussels on Thursday that he would like a gas price cap and more European debt, and then added slyly that it was “neither for Germany still good for Europe” if Germany isolates itself. To claim that the Franco-German engine is sputtering is a euphemism. This engine is as powerful as a mushy iceberg lettuce.

On Wednesday, Federal President Steinmeier canceled a visit to Ukraine for "security reasons". Swiss President Ignazio Cassis, famous for his daredevilry, took a slightly different view of the security situation and met President Selenskyj in Kyiv on Thursday.

Last week, in a speech marking the 70th anniversary of the Atlantic Bridge in Berlin, Steinmeier said: "We stand firmly on the side of Ukraine." he says something like that the next time.

"Kick-off Politics" is WELT's daily news podcast. The most important topic analyzed by WELT editors and the dates of the day. Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, among others, or directly via RSS feed.