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Al-Houthi: We find ourselves in the most sacred battle and the greatest position. We do not consider the sacrifices to be wasted losses; rather, we have given everything for the sake of this stance.
Al-Houthi: The Zionist scheme is undoubtedly a plot to enslave and exploit this nation. This is a fact, not an exaggeration.
Al-Houthi: Great sacrifice in the path of God only increases our steadfastness, determination, certainty, resilience, and cohesion.
Al-Houthi: The Zionist crime confirms the importance of Yemen's conscious and insightful position based on constants, values, and human ethics.
Al-Houthi: The Israeli enemy is a criminal who proves its brutality and monstrosity through all its criminal practices, void of any controls.
Al-Houthi: The Israeli enemy's record is one of terrible and horrific crimes, full of bloodshed against the Palestinian people and people in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
Al-Houthi: The crime of targeting ministers and civilian workers adds to the Israeli enemy's criminal record in the region.
Al-Houthi: All of the martyrs were ministers working in civilian fields.
Sayyed Abdul Malik al-Houthi: We extend our sincerest condolences to all the martyrs' families, their loved ones, their colleagues, and our dear people.
Al Mayadeen's correspondent: An Israeli drone targeted a residential apartment in the al-Natour Square in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City

News from Nowhere: All Trussed up & Nowhere to Go

  • Alex Roberts Alex Roberts
  • Source: Al Mayadeen English
  • 30 Apr 2024 01:03
7 Min Read

Liz Truss's seven weeks in Downing Street had begun when she was formally invited to take on the role by her namesake, Queen Elizabeth II.

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  • News from Nowhere: All Trussed up & Nowhere to Go
    News from Nowhere: All Trussed up & Nowhere to Go (Illustrated by Mahdi Rteil to Al Mayadeen English)

Yes, you heard me right. Please form an orderly queue at the library. We don't want anyone getting hurt in the stampede for copies.

Liz Truss's new book is titled Ten Years to Save the West. It might as well be called 320 Pages to Save My Reputation. It has also been published in installments by the Daily Mail. 

Yes, again you heard me right. Fans of the former Prime Minister – surely known as 'Trussies’ – would have been well advised to get to their local news agents hours before they opened, to ensure they didn’t miss out. 

The smart advice would have been to camp outside overnight. We wouldn’t have wanted anyone getting crushed in the rush for the most sought-after serialization since Charles Dickens killed off Little Nell or since Conan Doyle brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead.

Of course, this might have been the biggest global publishing phenomenon since the release of Harry Potter and the Cauldron of Tripe. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t.

The book was published halfway through April. Advance reviews included endorsements from failed presidential primary candidate Ted Cruz, failed World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, and failed British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Well, it takes one to know one. 

He often after all looks like the bombastic trickster Maui overshadowing Truss’s bewildered Hei Hei, hopelessly lost and way out of her depth.

Boris Johnson earned a half-a-million-pound advance on his (still unpublished) autobiography. Liz Truss was only paid £1,513 for hers. Perhaps she’d have got more if she’d agreed not to publish it 

The PR for her book also included praise from failed bank chairman Matt Ridley, the man who'd been in charge of Northern Rock in 2008 when it suffered the first run on a British bank in 130 years, and had to be bailed out by the UK Treasury. 

"History will be kinder to her than the media was," the talented Mr. Ridley says. Or perhaps it'll be even less kind to her than it's been to him.

The collapse of his bank is said to have cost the British taxpayer about £2 billion. The fiscal meltdown Ms. Truss precipitated cost about fifteen times that.

Her memoir's pre-publicity also cited praise from a journalist who has questioned the urgency of climate change and who described her magnum opus as "a fascinating and terrifying insight into the machinations of orthodox power".

Others might consider it a fascinating and terrifying insight into the machinations of the mind of a person who once, very briefly, wielded an inordinate amount of political power. Apart from the "fascinating" part.

Liz Truss's seven weeks in Downing Street had begun when she was formally invited to take on the role by her namesake, Queen Elizabeth II. The nation's longest-serving monarch appointed its shortest-serving premier. And, two days later, she died.

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It was her account of this momentous moment in national history which made the biggest headlines for Truss's book, as soon as its malevolent mutterings started to appear in the Daily Mail. 

The pathologically self-absorbed Conservative leader recalls how she fell into "a state of shock" when she heard the news of Her Majesty's death. Apparently unaware of anything beyond the bloated bubble of her own unassailable ego, she asked herself, "Why me...?" Because for her it was, of course, all about Liz Truss. 

She also recollects how the ailing Queen "gave no hint of discomfort" through the course of their twenty-minute audience, which must have been tough for Her Majesty, as she was renowned for being a shrewd judge of character.

She records that Queen Elizabeth had advised her new Prime Minister to pace herself in the job. This was a piece of advice which Ms. Truss steadfastly ignored. 

Indeed, instead of attempting to limit her ambitions to a sensible, patient pace, she chose to rush through a swathe of radical fiscal measures – against the advice of the few financial experts in government whom she hadn't already fired – and immediately crashed the entire British economy.

"Maybe I should have listened," Truss writes. But, of course, she didn't. Oops.

That was a rare moment of self-awareness from the country's most disastrous ever premier, one who today continues to blame the faceless forces of the establishment and officialdom for her downfall... a leader whose notorious ‘fiscal event’ makes Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler, Eden’s intervention in Suez, and Johnson’s pandemic party calendar look well-judged and prescient.

It makes the actions of the backbencher who last week quit the Tories following allegations that he’d used party funds to pay off “bad people” who’d locked him in a flat appear both sensible and justified.

Amidst its many expressions of paranoia and self-pity, her book also, incidentally, claims that her official residence was infested with fleas, for which she vaguely blames her predecessor's dog.

Adopting a tellingly autocratic idiom, she denounces the western world as “decadent and complacent” and goes on to say that she’d like to abolish the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Supreme Court, leave the European Convention on Human Rights, and fire the governor of the Bank of England.

She really still seems to believe that a conspiracy of the rich and powerful had felt it was worth wrecking the nation's finances merely in order to remove her from office – rather than the sad truth of the matter, the fact that the idiotic hubris of an insane set of plans implemented by her and her own rich and powerful friends brought the country, almost overnight, to its knees. 

Despite its unmitigated failure, her memoir describes her "ecstatic" feelings at the delivery of her catastrophic mini-budget. It was, she says, probably her "happiest moment as Prime Minister". Non, elle ne regrette rien.

No, history won't look kindly upon her toxic legacy. But it might look even less generously upon the motives of those shadowy associates who helped to nurture her career and who stood to make fortunes out of the economic misery which she quite needlessly inflicted upon her own people.

These days, she does her best to stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Donald Trump, a monster whose candidacy she’s enthusiastically endorsed, claiming that “the world was safer” on his watch and doubtless hoping that the crazies and the morons of the Alt Right won't be able to tell them apart. 

Yet history tends to be wiser than that. Even these days, it can tell the difference between a foolish dupe and a cruel crook, deluded and deceitful though both may be.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Mayadeen’s editorial stance.
  • Liz Truss
  • UK
Alex Roberts

Alex Roberts

Journalist, author, and academic.

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