Butler To The World

Oliver Bullough Profile €27.50★★★★★

If you’re an oligarch who doesn’t fancy paying taxes, or a kleptocrat who wants to avoid awkward questions about where your money comes from, the best thing you can do is head for Britain. Here, explains Oliver Bullough in this shockingly timely book, you will be able to call upon a fleet of lawyers and accountants who will show you how to exploit loopholes in English and Scottish law so you can hang on to your ill-gotten gains. More than keeping your millions under the radar, these discreet helpers will show you how to launder your reputation by making a donation to a museum, university or football club. Play your cards right and you might meet royalty.

Bullough characterises Britain’s role as being like that of the fictional butler Jeeves, who endlessly helps his feckless employer Bertie Wooster out of tight spots with the village bobby or his fearsome Aunt Agatha. Jeeves knows how to make problems go away.

And that, says Bullough, is what our nearest neighbours has been doing since 1956, when the Suez crisis marked the end of their Empire. If Britain no longer had the power to boss other people around, it could at least make itself useful by offering them an ‘ask no questions’ approach when it came to maximising their fortune! Long before Putin’s (left) people made a beeline for London, there were plenty of warlords and gangster capitalists who made use of such places as the British Virgin Islands or Gibraltar as a convenient resting place for their cash.

Will the Ukrainian invasion mark a turning point in Britain’s addiction to other people’s dirty money? Bullough isn’t optimistic. The justification he gets time and time again from today’s British butlers is that ‘if we didn’t do it, then someone else would’. Is that really a good enough reason, though? After reading Bullough’s excellent book, the answer is far from clear.