His Excellency the Ambassador

Author's name: Ghazi bin Abdulrahman Al-Qusaibi Publisher: Arab Foundation for Studies and Publishing Year of publication: 2003 Literary classification: Political novel Brief about the book: Sorry, Your Excellency Ambassador... I would like to start with a question about the true owners of the keys to power. How can a diplomat identify them? Yusuf thinks for a moment, then answers: Unfortunately, there is no easy way. And unfortunately, you won't find a book explaining the method; some of these important people are known to everyone. It is undoubtedly in everyone's mind that the strongest man in Britain today is the Prime Minister, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and so on. Sometimes newspapers and magazines publish lists of important people, the top hundred or two hundred. These lists reflect the opinion of the publication and do not necessarily reflect reality. The real problem is knowing the people whose names do not appear in the media, and who do not hold political positions. Here, the ambassador must use every available means to find out about these people. Once I arrived in Britain, I asked three specialized public relations companies, in other words, lobby firms, to prepare a list of the top thousand people in Britain. Some of these names appeared repeatedly in all three lists, and some did not. Sometimes, enormous influence exists in places no one expects. The Prime Minister’s secretary, Harold Wilson, was, in his final years in office, more important than some ministers. During King Farouk’s days, the personal servant responsible for his clothes appointed and dismissed ministers. During President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s era, a journalist, whom you all know, was more important than most ministers. Some say he was the second man in the regime, but that is an exaggeration far from reality. When I was ambassador in Al-Nahrawan, I discovered a barber who had more influence than some ministers. Perhaps you knew them, the customer of this barber... Your Excellency Ambassador! And what happens when the ambassador succeeds in knowing the owners of the keys, as I called them? When we look into the eyes of Your Excellency Ambassador’s floor, without intermediaries or pleas, through a general permit to enter granted by Your Excellency, we enter his diplomatic world, see behind the scenes, and hear what is behind the dialogues. It is a world as much as you dream of approaching to be part of it, as much as you distance yourself fleeing from it and from its inhumane faces in human beings. Ghazi Al-Qusaibi reveals to you the secrets of the world of ambassadors, by virtue of his possession of them, and takes you with his insights into the world of politics. He weaves for you the story of Your Excellency the ambassador and crafts the characters of the story with the skill of a novelist and the ambassador’s wife, and presents a symbol that allows him to speak the forbidden and disclose secrets. Your mind will not be stunned before the painful reality that Al-Qusaibi depicts with his wonderful style, blending satire and pain, laughter and tears, dreams and reality, imagination and actuality. You travel with Al-Qusaibi in your mind, feelings, and humanity, searching through the depths of his lines for those meanings deeper than the event itself, which philosophize him to the point of creativity.