Please spare a thought for The Sun’s political editor Harry Cole and The Spectator’s James Heale, who were probably expecting Liz Truss to last a lot longer than 44 days as prime minister when they announced they were writing the biography of her premiership.
Titled Out of the Blue with a release date of 8th December, the book has had to have a minor change to its longer title to reflect the fact she is now the shortest-serving UK prime minister in history – replacing the word “astonishing” in “the inside story of Liz Truss and her astonishing rise to power” with the word “explosive”.
That’ll do it.
Following Ms Truss’ resignation on Thursday, Mr Heale took to Twitter and said it was “back to the rewrites”.
Out of the Blue also got a mention during Prime Minister’s Questions the day before, when Labour leader Keir Starmer asked the PM: “A book is being written about the prime minister’s time in office. Apparently, it’s going to be out by Christmas.
“Is that the release date or the title?”
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Ouch.
According to the Evening Standard, a final chapter called ‘Into the Red’ has been added to the book, while Mr Heale told Bloomberg News that “huge swathes will be the same, but now the ending will change”.
“The tenses will have to change,” he said.
\u201cBack to the rewrites\u2026\u201d— James Heale (@James Heale) 1666269357
We can only imagine what those last-minute editorial meetings between Mr Cole and Mr Heale will be like, and that is exactly what we’re going to do.
So here’s our best guess at the final chapter, which we’ve also decided to rename to something far more appropriate.
Epilogue: Defeated by a lettuce
We couldn’t believe it either. After Suella Braverman ranted about “tofu-eating wokerati”, she threw in the towel as home secretary after sending a draft written ministerial statement from a personal email address. When Liz Truss was challenged by the Daily Star to outlast an actual wet lettuce, she soon announced it was her time to go too.
We look forward to her successor being ousted by an asparagus.
And as we’re forced to write this updated final chapter, we realise this book’s final draft deadline has had more extensions than Article 50.
When we learned Liz Truss’ tenure as prime minister was going to end rather abruptly, our response was the same as Tory MP Stephen Hammond, who after learning from a right-wing blog that the chief whip and deputy chief whip hadn’t resigned on Thursday, replied: "No. F***."
Please. No more.
And now it looks like the prime minister who resigned in disgrace following mass ministerial resignations and Partygate is going to replace the prime minister who resigned in disgrace after tanking the pound.
Somebody pass us a suitcase full of wine.
The invoice is in the post, chaps.
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