Margaret Thatcher had a penetrating stare that left colleagues unnerved and ready to do her bidding.
During conversations with fellow Tories or civil servants, Liz Truss can look into their eyes for several seconds, smiling without speaking. It can be awkward at times but it is said to have a similar effect as that achieved by her political idol.
Ms Truss - who hopes to become the UK's third female prime minister after Mrs Thatcher and Theresa May - was three when Mrs Thatcher entered office and 16 when she left in 1991. If she harboured secret teenage admiration for the effective but divisive Conservative leader, she hid it well.
The prime minister’s name would have been frequently mentioned in her household, but only in highly pejorative terms. Ms Truss’s parents, a math’s professor father and a nurse mother, were on the far left of politics, supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and socialist causes.
Perhaps it was the contradictions of teenage rebellion that drew the teenage Liz to the Tory stalwart who her parents found so offensive.
If it did, then she made her move to the right in steady tacks, waiting until she got to the University of Oxford, where she studied PPE ― politics, philosophy and economics ― before joining the Liberal Democrats. An act, she later claimed, of rebellion and to annoy her parents and perhaps payback too, for the long hours spent on marches or demonstrations.
She rubbed it in by becoming president of the Oxford University Lib Dems and she was certainly committed, as recently unearthed television footage shows her at the annual conference, when she was 19, lambasting both the monarchy and the Conservative Party.
But graduating from Oxford and entering the business world with Shell oil appeared to have a salutary effect, witnessing the importance of the economy in shaping a country.
The Conservatives had been in power for 17 years when Ms Truss joined the party aged 21, five years after Mrs Thatcher had been ousted in another example of ruthless Tory defenestration.
Her parents’ reaction to her joining the party of Thatcher has not been fully recorded. There may well have been smug looks around the kitchen table when Tony Blair’s New Labour won the 1997 election in a landslide.
But Ms Truss was convinced the Conservatives were the natural party of government and economic management. Her conviction remained undimmed by personal election defeats as a councillor and then standing for parliament.
Her strong will caught David Cameron’s eye and she was put on the A list of candidates for the 2010 election and given a safe Tory seat. But she almost lost South West Norfolk by failing to disclose an extramarital affair that led to a vote to terminate her candidacy.
She won that and the seat and after just two years as a backbencher she was made education minister, having written some liberal-minded papers on the subject.
Ms Truss, who unlike the Tory elite was educated in a comprehensive school, entered Cabinet in 2014 and has remained there ever since.
She started as environment secretary, making her point by stating, unlike her predecessor, that climate change was largely man-made. She was a whole-hearted Remainer in the Brexit referendum but she quickly became a committed Brexiteer in Theresa May’s government.
It was her demotion from justice secretary to chief secretary to the treasury under Mrs May that is said to have provided a seminal political moment in which she stopped worrying what other people thought and got on with following her own path. “It marked a turning point for her,” a friend said. “Getting demoted made her realise that she had to start being herself and taking risks.”
On Ms May’s ousting she pledged allegiance to Boris Johnson and was made international trade secretary, striking a number of international free trade deals, including those with Japan and Australia.
Then in September 2021 she became foreign secretary, remaining in post while many around Mr Johnson resigned in early July.
The post has allowed her to be pictured riding a tank, again drawing parallels with Thatcher, who famously was also photographed in the turret of Challenger tank, giving rise to further newspaper headlines about the Iron Lady.
Joining the Conservatives also led to romance after she met her future husband, Hugh O’Leary, at the party conference. She gave birth to two daughters who are now teenagers, Frances, 16 and Liberty, 14.
They are largely kept out of the spotlight and their political views are unknown. That privacy will be challenged if, as the polls suggest, their mother gets the keys to Downing Street in early September.
With the energy crisis, war in Europe and recession looming, as prime minister Liz Truss will be thoroughly examined on whether she is the true inheritor of Thatcher’s iron will.
How to wear a kandura
Dos
- Wear the right fabric for the right season and occasion
- Always ask for the dress code if you don’t know
- Wear a white kandura, white ghutra / shemagh (headwear) and black shoes for work
- Wear 100 per cent cotton under the kandura as most fabrics are polyester
Don’ts
- Wear hamdania for work, always wear a ghutra and agal
- Buy a kandura only based on how it feels; ask questions about the fabric and understand what you are buying
The Voice of Hind Rajab
Starring: Saja Kilani, Clara Khoury, Motaz Malhees
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Rating: 4/5
Rocketman
Director: Dexter Fletcher
Starring: Taron Egerton, Richard Madden, Jamie Bell
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Off-roading in the UAE: How to checklist
Korean Film Festival 2019 line-up
Innocent Witness, June 26 at 7pm
On Your Wedding Day, June 27 at 7pm
The Great Battle, June 27 at 9pm
The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion, June 28 at 4pm
Romang, June 28 at 6pm
Mal Mo E: The Secret Mission, June 28 at 8pm
Underdog, June 29 at 2pm
Nearby Sky, June 29 at 4pm
A Resistance, June 29 at 6pm
The years Ramadan fell in May
More on animal trafficking
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
Red flags
- Promises of high, fixed or 'guaranteed' returns.
- Unregulated structured products or complex investments often used to bypass traditional safeguards.
- Lack of clear information, vague language, no access to audited financials.
- Overseas companies targeting investors in other jurisdictions - this can make legal recovery difficult.
- Hard-selling tactics - creating urgency, offering 'exclusive' deals.
Courtesy: Carol Glynn, founder of Conscious Finance Coaching
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
GAC GS8 Specs
Engine: 2.0-litre 4cyl turbo
Power: 248hp at 5,200rpm
Torque: 400Nm at 1,750-4,000rpm
Transmission: 8-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 9.1L/100km
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh149,900
The specs
Engine: 4.0-litre flat-six
Torque: 450Nm at 6,100rpm
Transmission: 7-speed PDK auto or 6-speed manual
Fuel economy, combined: 13.8L/100km
On sale: Available to order now
Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Evacuations to France hit by controversy
- Over 500 Gazans have been evacuated to France since November 2023
- Evacuations were paused after a student already in France posted anti-Semitic content and was subsequently expelled to Qatar
- The Foreign Ministry launched a review to determine how authorities failed to detect the posts before her entry
- Artists and researchers fall under a programme called Pause that began in 2017
- It has benefited more than 700 people from 44 countries, including Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Sudan
- Since the start of the Gaza war, it has also included 45 Gazan beneficiaries
- Unlike students, they are allowed to bring their families to France
The five new places of worship
Church of South Indian Parish
St Andrew's Church Mussaffah branch
St Andrew's Church Al Ain branch
St John's Baptist Church, Ruwais
Church of the Virgin Mary and St Paul the Apostle, Ruwais
'Top Gun: Maverick'
Rating: 4/5
Directed by: Joseph Kosinski
Starring: Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Miles Teller, Glen Powell, Ed Harris
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Farage on Muslim Brotherhood
Nigel Farage told Reform's annual conference that the party will proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood if he becomes Prime Minister.
"We will stop dangerous organisations with links to terrorism operating in our country," he said. "Quite why we've been so gutless about this – both Labour and Conservative – I don't know.
“All across the Middle East, countries have banned and proscribed the Muslim Brotherhood as a dangerous organisation. We will do the very same.”
It is 10 years since a ground-breaking report into the Muslim Brotherhood by Sir John Jenkins.
Among the former diplomat's findings was an assessment that “the use of extreme violence in the pursuit of the perfect Islamic society” has “never been institutionally disowned” by the movement.
The prime minister at the time, David Cameron, who commissioned the report, said membership or association with the Muslim Brotherhood was a "possible indicator of extremism" but it would not be banned.
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
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