With the backing of just 0.15% of the population (80,000 card-carrying Tories – the very worst people on Earth) the UK’s third prime minister in three years has been foisted on us and seized power without any mandate from the electorate whatsoever, and now the spectacularly stupid and thoroughly nasty Truss is proceeding without let or hindrance to plunge the rotten British State down to brand new depths of cruelty, barbarism, wickedness and incompetence. Add yet another one to the long list of terrible Tory PMs.

■ She has selected her cabinet from the dregs of the dregs, her small pool of cronies and fanatical rightwing soulmates, having dispensed with all of Johnson’s crew of merely very rightwing inadequates. This, remember, follows the purging of all talent and the expulsion of all the sensible, paternalistic, ‘one nation’ Tories from the party in the wake of Brexit in what amounted to a complete takeover by the know-nothing thugs of Farage’s UKIP. This means the UK is now being run by the most rightwing government in its entire history – which is saying something. Already the civil service is being systematically cleansed of any expertise, experience and neutrality, starting with the brutal dismissal of the permanent secretary at the Treasury, to be replaced by compliant appointees who will not contradict Truss’s crazed ideological fixations.

■ At least Truss, in ditching all Johnson’s vacuous populist waffle about ‘levelling up’, is making the ideology of Conservatism crystal clear. Democracy must submit to the “the market” and to the power of money, and any impediments to the accumulation of wealth – things like tax, redistribution, fairness, compassion, social conscience, public ownership, regulation, standards, trade unions, political protest – must be obliterated. Nothing must trump this dogma – not damning evidence of harm, not obscene inequality, not the destitution of millions of people, not the collapse of the natural world. The slightest deviation from this insane doctrine is to be crushed by oppressive new laws and the vicious propaganda of the billionaire press barons. She’s only been in power for a fortnight, and already the examples are coming thick and fast: the cap on bankers’ outrageously huge bonuses introduced after the 2008 financial crisis is to be scrapped while the wages of nurses, care home staff, teachers, emergency workers, cleaners and other vital workers are cut and cut again; with complete contempt for ordinary households and absolute indifference to the cost of living crisis, tax cuts that hugely benefit the rich and do next to nothing for everyone else are being prioritised as a matter of urgency – the richest will be better off by £9,187 per year, the poorest by £22.12p and the UK will entrench its standing as Europe’s most unequal country; long overdue increases in corporation tax on big business are to be abandoned and there will be no windfall taxes on the energy companies’ monstrous £170 billion annual profiteering while people’s bills rocket by 100% – even allowing for the immediate breaking of her “no handouts” vow with a freeze on further rises that will cost £90 billion, adding to the liabilities of the bankrupt nation while illustrating how leaving everything to “the market” is insanity even for her; she asserts ignorantly that cutting taxes on the super-rich will stimulate economic growth, never mind that such deluded ‘trickle-down’ economics were thoroughly discredited over 40 years ago and it’s an indisputable fact that the highest-taxing countries have the strongest growth; the low-rent Thatcher tribute act robotically drones her favourite meaningless uninspiring soundbite “aspiration nation”, stolen from David Cameron, as if it were a policy; and, most amazingly of all, this spiteful, smug, sly, silly cow actually manages to make one nostalgic for her disgusting predecessor!

■ Truss is an economic illiterate. Twelve long years of Tory fuck-the-future recklessness and anarchy mean the UK is the most indebted nation on the planet, and the UK population has the most personal debt. On top of that there is the worst cost of living crisis for 90 years, the highest inflation rate for 40 years, a full-blown recession and public services so deprived of funds after 12 years of deliberate Tory negligence that, to take just one example, over 95% of burglaries and thefts aren’t even investigated let alone lead to an arrest (they’re safe; Tories live in alarmed, gated enclaves patrolled by private security guards and monitored by banks of cameras). In this scenario the cuts in income tax and corporation tax amount to economic suicide, a catastrophe for public services and the social realm with a collapse in the pound and a mass exodus of capital to follow. For Truss and her very scary chancellor of the exchequer, old collaborator Kwasi Kwarteng, this is all good. Having avoided what would have been damning criticism from the Office of Budget Responsibility by barring its involvement because apparently the announcements did not constitute a budget, they are akin to fundamentalist religious zealots craving armageddon, chaos and destruction.

■ She wants to de-regulate everything so there are absolutely no restraints on the ‘freedom’ of ruthless capitalist profiteers to do as they please no matter what the consequences. To give a flavour of what she has in store one only has to look at the consequences of her disastrous stint as England’s environment secretary from 2014-2016 (thankfully environment is one of the few devolved areas, so Wales was spared the worst of her dumb recklessness and irresponsibility – although rivers along the Wales/England border such as the Wye have been grievously damaged). She cut what she called the ‘red tape’ of farm inspections by 80%, allowed landowners and farmers to manage watercourses themselves and presided over the effective end of the Environment Agency’s sewage monitoring system – including the surveillance of water companies to prevent the dumping of raw sewage. Result: a catastrophic cocktail of farming pollutants has been dumped into rivers, turning them into lifeless, poisoned drains, and the amount of raw sewage pumped into the seas and rivers by the hugely profitable water companies has increased by a mind-boggling 3,000% since Truss did her dirty work. Brexit then completed the job by ending the EU’s system of fines for water pollution by the water companies, and then in 2021 the Conservatives voted against stopping the dumping of raw sewage at sea, so that their friends and donors who own the companies privatised by Thatcher could be ‘free’ to pollute on a massive scale with impunity. The ring of human excrement surrounding the UK is now visible from space. For Truss this was an attack on “bureaucracy” and “inefficiency” – how appropriate that she bears such a striking resemblance to a particularly smelly turd. The result of her sheer incompetence and wickedness has been massive rises in the bonuses of the water company bosses and the siphoning out of £60 million in salaries and shareholder dividends for fat-cats in the last five years alone, while UK beaches and rivers are left choked with shit. Hey, she’s created a “defecation nation”!

■ The bonfire of pesky regulations Truss has in store will include residual EU regulations that still apply to the financial sector and the City of London, covering important areas such as consumer protection, governance, accountability and risk assessment. They will all go, along with the City regulator itself (the FCA), leaving an entirely free-for-all snakepit perfect for malpractice, fraud and grand larceny on an epic scale that will bring about the opposite of what she intends: the end of the City’s place as the centre of global finance. Then there are all the hard-won advances for workers brought by EU membership that she will sweep away to appease the Brexit-obsessed Tory far-right: working time regulations, agency work regulations, various health and safety regulations, protection of employment (TUPE) regulations and rights to sick pay, holiday pay and parental leave. The endlessly delayed and desperately needed regulation of gambling, where immoral betting firms make billions out of the vulnerable and the addicted, will be ditched, as will long-planned attempts to regulate the food industry and begin to tackle the childhood obesity epidemic and the dangerous health consequences of junk food dependency. Food hygiene regulations, planning regulations, advertising regulations and alcohol, smoking and indeed all public health campaigns will be on the Truss bonfire too. Regarding the environment, by next year she intends to revoke no less than 527 protections rolled over from EU law after Brexit, covering everything from water quality and clean air to habitat protection and pesticide use, and submit the UK to a de-regulatory, race to the bottom eco-catastrophe in the name of capitalist “freedom” – so much for previous environment secretary Michael Gove’s earnest promise that EU laws would only be strengthened and never watered-down. In addition she will tear up all the UK’s supposedly binding and pretty feeble ‘net zero’ commitments and burn baby burn; yes, to hell with the future, go for growth, bring on new oil-wells, open-cast coal mines and fracking to sate her fucked-up, frenzied, fossil-fuel fantasies and anthropocentric delusions. As for the Tory manifesto pledge that there will be no fracking, she and her business secretary, the ludicrous climate-change denier Jacob Rees-Mogg, intend to get around any scrutiny and accountability by declaring it a ‘major national infrastructure’ matter like roads and railways that can be implemented by dictat: if they try that in Cymru the Turd and Lord Snooty are in for a shock.

■ The Tories hate the NHS; they always have. Taxes paying for free health care for all? Treatment based on clinical need rather than the ability to pay? That’s socialism!! They fought ferociously against the founding of the NHS back in 1946 and, apart from a 30-year truce between 1950 and 1980 when comparatively civilised Conservatives reconciled to public ownership and the concept of the NHS dominated the Tory Party, they have been busy undermining, dismantling and surreptitiously wrecking it ever since. Truss, somewhere to the right of Goebbels on the political spectrum, will be the biggest menace yet to the last remaining aspect of the UK that’s worth preserving. The appointment of the ridiculous Therese Coffey as health & social care secretary says it all. After 12 years of Tory government there are nearly 7 million people on hospital waiting lists, 132,000 NHS posts are currently vacant, there is a shortage of around 5,000 GPs, hundreds die every week waiting for an ambulance to turn up, more than half the inpatients ready to be discharged from hospital cannot do so because the care they will need is simply not available, and thousands are turning to private health in desperation, often raising the funds via online campaigns, thereby stripping the NHS of more staff while allowing the sector to rake in huge profits and, of course, fill Tory Party coffers with grateful donations. Coffey’s response has firstly been to blame her Tory predecessors, as if they had no connection to her and Truss, supporters of every funding cut and privatisation of the previous Cameron/May/Johnson regimes. And when that didn’t wash she actually resorted to blaming feckless NHS staff and GPs. Coffey, a close confidante of Truss and her campaign manager in the Tory leadership contest, is a morbidly obese confirmed spinster, bible-bashing anti-abortionist and keen collector of freebies, hospitality and perks that nobody in their right mind would put in charge of a bin-bag much less the NHS. So she got the job. She has quickly grabbed headlines in the rightwing gutter press by asserting that GPs in England will henceforth be compelled to see patients within two weeks: to which Jeremy Hunt, one of her Tory predecessors as health secretary, devastatingly responded: “GPs alone already have 72 targets. Adding a 73rd won’t help because it’s not more targets the NHS needs, it’s more doctors.” Coffey’s reaction to the workforce crisis has not been the obvious one (er, fund a major expansion of places for the training of more medical, nursing and allied health professionals): instead, she is calling on the public to “do their bit” as part of “a national endeavour” to somehow or other prop up the NHS. The chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing wearily reacted to Coffey’s ‘plan’ with: “The basic issue this does not address is that we don’t have enough nursing staff.” Coffey, normally incapable of keeping her gob shut, is strangely silent about the fundamental causes of the NHS crisis: underfunding (the lowest per-capita spend in Europe), understaffing, and Toryism itself. As people die for want of treatment, Truss is only going to accelerate the death by a thousand cuts of the precious NHS. What the NHS needs is MONEY, and she is implacably, dogmatically opposed to wealthy people like her parting with a penny of it for the greater good.

■ When Truss was Johnson’s foreign secretary, she was so partial to making embarrassingly dumb interventions in international affairs and doing things like sticking her head out of the turret of an armoured tank on Salisbury Downs or wearing a fur hat in Red Square as part of her demented Thatcher impression, that she became a global laughing-stock, notorious for her delusions of British grandeur and her tragi-comic efforts to whip-up some long-gone British relevance. Moreover, her open encouraging of UK people to join the war in Ukraine as mercenaries was a direct breach of the 1870 Foreign Enlistment act – by the foreign secretary no less! – and a serious criminal offence. She didn’t know, and cared less. Now this bad joke is in charge and already promising huge increases in defence spending from the UK’s empty exchequer and making more inane, warmongering, provocative statements – like goading Putin to go nuclear, implying France is an enemy of the UK and outlining plans to follow the solitary example set by Donald Trump and relocate the UK embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Like Johnson, she makes a big noise about opposing Putin and assisting Ukraine – and, like Johnson, it is all posturing bullshit. Let us not forget that the Tories had no problem with Russian secret funding and online propaganda being a major factor in the Brexit vote and no problem with Putin’s pals and fellow oligarchs sitting in the Lords, controlling mass media and sports clubs, funding the Tory Party and buying up central London. Then Putin invades Ukraine and suddenly we are supposed to swallow their newly discovered opposition to militarism, imperialism and annexation of lands – this from the fervent supporters of the British Empire, who will brook no criticism whatsoever of the most violent and most extensive imperialist power in all of history. Hey Truss, listen: as you’re such a democrat and so against the seizure and annexation of other countries by force will you now disown the incomparably murderous, brutal British Empire and make sure the teaching of its true history is compulsory in English schools? And will you now begin to rectify the appalling damage by making full reparations around the world and putting right the multitude of ongoing, persisting wrongs? You can make a start by releasing the crippling colonial shackles the English Tory Party has imposed by force on a nation-in-waiting called Wales where the Tories have never won an election since the introduction of universal suffrage. As if! We might have to do that job ourselves…

■ In her victory speech earlier this month, Truss showed mind-boggling insensitivity, unawareness, obnoxiousness and contempt by taking the opportunity to praise and thank her predecessor, as if he was gracefully stepping down after selfless service rather than being removed from office in disgrace by his Tory colleagues after a shameful two years of brazen dishonesty and criminality. This is the measure of the women: she is just fine with Johnson’s shocking degradation of political standards; to her, this is the new norm to be continued unabated and even intensified. She’s at it already, breaking solemn pledges willy-nilly, rewriting history and denying factual truths (eg: she claims that there have been no economic problems as a result of Brexit, just “new opportunities unleashed”; she describes posh Roundhay School, a prestigious ex-grammar in the solidly Tory and prosperous suburbs of north-east Leeds where she had her secondary education, as if it were some sort of inner-city hell-hole – a version that has been condemned as “patently untrue” by fellow pupils and everyone with any knowledge of the school; she states that the energy crisis, which actually predates the Ukraine conflict, is “caused by Putin’s war” – when only 4% of UK energy was supplied by Russia; and so on, ad infinitum). A glance at the 47-year-old’s track record shows that this flaky duplicity is par for the course. Having dabbled with a phase of late-teenage rebellion at Oxford Uni as a pro-cannabis, anti-monarchy LibDem (Ooh! Steady on girl! With hindsight LibDems of that era see her puerile posturing and the tabloid headlines it generated as a treacherous way of sabotaging the LibDems), she ditched all that stuff and joined the Tory Party at age 21 as soon as she graduated with her mediocre Philosophy, Politics & Economics degree from elitist Merton College. She was promptly hired by petrochemical giant Shell and never looked back, eventually becoming a chartered accountant, snaffling a husband (another accountant) at a Tory Conference, and having an affair with her political mentor Mark Field MP, which helped her find the winnable safe Tory seat of South West Norfolk and wrecked his marriage in the process. Once she got elected in 2010 she co-authored (with Kwarteng among others) a seriously unhinged pamphlet called Britannia Unchained that described the British as “among the worst idlers in the world” and then, having campaigned to remain in the EU, she performed a political somersault as soon as the referendum result was in and transformed herself into one of the most vociferous and hard-line Brexiteers. Everyone who has encountered her over the years remarks that the overwhelming impression she has always exuded is one of almost pathological ambition and self-belief that far outreaches any discernible abilities. Many point out her complete lack of genuine principles, her reliance on cheap slogans and her tendency to say whatever her audience want to hear. Dominic Cummings has commented that she is “as close to properly crackers as anybody I have met in parliament”. For me, looking at her physically helps to grasp what we are dealing with. The glimpse of cleavage, the display of leg, the come-fuck-me sneakers, the dagger-like stilettos, the age-inappropriate image of a pushy, preppy ‘Mean Girl’ straight out of US High School archetypes – she actually fancies herself! For heaven’s sake look in a mirror dearie! Oh yes, she is best understood in time-worn terms: a prostitute*.

*NOTE: Derived from the Latin Pro Statuere, stand instead of

Picture: Wilfrid Wood