LONDON — As the news broke that Kwasi Kwarteng, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, had been fired on Friday, Britons on both sides of the political divide expressed dismay over Prime Minister Liz Truss’s first month in power and said that her leadership position looked increasingly untenable.
“It has been a complete disaster,” said Simon Bubb, a supporter of the opposition Labour Party who was out shopping in London on Friday with his young son. “The direction that the government has been going in for the past three or four years has just been increasing chaos.”
“What we now have is a situation in the country where everybody knows there should be a general election, but we’re not going to get one,” said Mr. Bubb, who said he had listened to Ms. Truss’s remarks in the car. “She might limp on, but I’m hoping in a way that she stays just so we get fewer Tory M.P.s at the next election.”
Mr. Bubb said that the decision to fire Mr. Kwarteng, Britain’s top finance official, was an attempt by the prime minister to save her own skin, something that he doubted would work.
“She’s completely thrown him under the bus,” he said, adding that Ms. Truss’s position “still remained pretty much impossible” regardless of any policy reversals or cabinet shifts she made.
“Most people realize that she and him were a double act, so she’s not really fooling anybody,” Mr. Bubb said.
Morag Draycott, 64, a Conservative Party supporter, agreed that recent weeks in British politics had resembled a sinking ship.
“They obviously did not think about their policies and the effects of them,” Ms. Draycott said as she emerged from a supermarket, adding that she was struggling to keep up in Britain’s spiraling cost-of-living crisis.
Ms. Draycott said that she remained supportive of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and that she believed he should be allowed to step back into the fold.
“They made such a thing about Partygate because the guy had a drink,” she said, referring to a political scandal that ultimately catalyzed Mr. Johnson’s resignation in July. “It’s ridiculous.”
Matthew Redington, 51, a self-employed painter and decorator, was unsurprised at the news on Friday as he stood sipping his tea outside a house he was working on.
“At the end of the day, you’ve got to deal with the reality of the situation, and if what you’ve done has caused the markets to suddenly crash, then it shows that you have to rethink,” Mr. Redington said, referring to Ms. Truss’s mini-budget, which she partly backed away from in her remarks on Friday.
“You used to believe when you were young that the people in command are in command, but now you feel that they’re in such a bizarre bubble that they’ve completely lost touch with reality,” said Mr. Redington, who said that although his politics aligned with the Conservatives, he had never voted for them.
It was a sentiment replicated around the country on Friday.
In Bradford, in England’s north, Lisa Thorp, who works in a nursery, said that after weeks of political turmoil, she was not surprised by the news.
“I wanted to believe in Truss,” Ms. Thorp, 45, a Conservative supporter and mother of three, said after she had finished making dinner for the family. “Unfortunately, I don’t feel she has the backbone to lead the party,” she added, explaining that she still backed Boris Johnson, the former prime minister.
But not everyone on Friday was so diplomatic. Julie Ambrose, who lives in Essex, in England’s east, said the Truss’s government had been a “car crash.”
“It’s farcical that the prime minister has been elected with fewer votes than the postal workers who voted to strike — that’s not democracy, it’s a travesty,” said Ms. Ambrose, 62, a Labour supporter who lives in a safe Conservative seat.
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