The BBC and Channel 4 were quick – or should we say Swift – to mock Liz Truss’s short premiership during their evening round-ups on Thursday.
Truss resigned on Thursday, making her the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister in history. She spent just 44 days in Downing Street before announcing she was stepping down, and her replacement will be in No.10 within a week.
But her time in office was by no means uneventful. Economic chaos, ruptures in the Tory party and two senior ministerial resignations all marred her premiership.
On Thursday evening, BBC Newsnight started with a black and white filter soundtracked to Rihanna’s Take A Bow from 2008 to really send the message home, including footage of her first (and presumably last) Conservative Party conference as the leader.
As she walked on stage to applause from her colleagues, Rihanna started up with the lyric: “How about a round of applause/ Standing ovation.”
The clever editing then shows some fellow Tory MPs looking pretty unimpressed, as Rihanna sings: “You look so dumb right now.”
As it reaches, “standing outside my house, trying to apologise,” the black and white filter lifts, and the footage flashes to Ms Truss actually standing outside No.10 Downing Street to announce her resignation.
The first line of the prime minister’s statement plays – “I came into office at a time of great economic and international instability,” – before she’s cut out by Rihanna saying: “Leave. Just cut it out.”
″Don’t tell me you’re sorry when you’re not,” Rihanna sings – as Truss’s claim she is a “fighter and not a quitter” from PMQs only the day before her resignation races across the screen.
Of course, King Charles’s now famous phrase, “dear oh dear”, when he met Ms Truss for only the second time made the cut, too.
“You put on quite a show,” the lyrics continue, as more editing shows the outgoing prime minister looking bewildered by a sea of journalists.
A shocked reporter’s face flashes up too, as Rihanna sings “you put on quite a show, very entertaining”, along with an extract from furious Tory MP Charles Walker laying into his party’s leadership.
The show also cuts off Ms Truss’s list of achievements from her final speech, to just include ”we delivered on energy bills” – pretty much the only policy which went to plan during her six weeks in Downing Street – before showing her walking into No.10, the door slamming shut and the music abruptly stopping.
Then, there was the Channel 4 News′ tribute, which – albeit 30 seconds shorter in length – recognised Ms Truss’s favourite song, Blank Space by Taylor Swift.
As the song kicks off with “nice to meet you,” it shows the happier footage from Ms Truss’s first few days in office.
″Magic, madness, heaven, sin” – for each word, a different expression (each more animated than the last) from Ms Truss plays out on screen.
“Oh my god, look at that face, you look like my next mistake,” Taylor sings as the camera zooms in on the outgoing Tory leader.
Flashing to footage of her final opponent during the leadership race, Rishi Sunak, who is pipped to throw his hat into the ring again, Taylor sings: “That’s the game – wanna play?”
Channel 4 also included the footage of Truss getting lost in a conference room after giving a speech, and the PM looking her European counterparts up and down while the lyrics say: “I can make the bad guys good for the weekend.”
“So it’s going to be forever, or it’s going to go down in flames,” Taylor sings as the editing flashes to Kwasi Kwarteng, the PM’s ill-fated chancellor who she sacked over the mini-budget, even though they were good friends.