Unmissable, deeply depressing ... He dates the shift to the Suez crisis in 1956, the year that Britain’s imperial apparatus finally collapsed, and the establishment cast around for another source of wealth to keep it in the style to which it had long become accustomed.
It is hard to imagine a more timely book than Oliver Bullough’s damning account of Britain’s role in facilitating oligarchs and criminals in their acquisition of billions of pounds’ worth of ill-gotten gains ... Butler to the World is both a brilliant and depressing blast at decades of malign financial cosiness and the politicians who let it happen ... One of the great things about his book is that Bullough doesn’t just sit back and drily condemn all this financial skulduggery, he goes to meet the people who helped create the conditions that allowed it to happen ... It takes guts to write and publish a book like this.
An urgent account of Britain’s history of welcoming corrupt capital. By the end, readers will sneer at the claim of successive British governments that, as Mr Johnson has put it, no country 'could conceivably be doing more to root out corrupt Russian money'. The gulf between rhetoric and reality has been chasmic ... The most revealing chapter is on the 'Scottish limited partnership' ... Mr Bullough argues compellingly that though more anti-corruption funds and tougher enforcement are welcome, what is really needed is a change of philosophy: for principles to take precedence over the profits of a few.
Bullough argues that the City needed to reinvent itself as the 'amoral servant of wealth wherever it could be found', but he doesn’t show that Suez had anything to do with it. In any case, this is the conceit on which he hangs a series of grimly fascinating chapters, each focusing on a different financial and legal loophole ... In perhaps the most remarkable chapter, he charts the birth of the Gibraltarian betting industry, which began in 1989 with a single betting shop and two telephonists, but now handles about $78 billion in British online bets.
One can sense the urgency and dismay in Bullough’s writing, but, given the political direction of Britain at the moment, he is not optimistic. Britain is better than this, he says. Why, I do not know. Nor am I convinced of his central conceit — Britain as butler — which he hammers in at every opportunity, and which soon becomes tiresome. A butler, Bullough must know, is constrained by his class and opportunities. Britain isn’t. It chooses to be corrupt and complicit.
Mr. Bullough, a lively and clever writer, has alighted on a lively and clever metaphor around which he builds Butler to the World. His metaphor, alas, can’t sustain the weight of a book and must be stretched and contorted to cover too much ground. It would have been more effective in an op-ed essay or a pamphlet. A more serious problem lies in Mr. Bullough’s distinct antipathy to capitalism. He dislikes money-making and rich people, not just kleptocrats ... Where Mr. Bullough’s book has real value is in its accounts of some truly awful people—the kleptocrats and oligarchs who should have been his sole focus ... a book by a man who imagines money everywhere to be stashed (my pejorative verb, not his). And this money, inherently distasteful, evades taxes and works always secretly for some nefarious purpose. His is a Manichaean view of wealth, part Boy Scout, part Thomas Piketty ... Mr. Bullough melds the Clean Rich with the Dirty Rich, making them one consolidated cadre of avarice and turpitude. And in doing so, he concludes that the provision of any service to the rich—whether by bankers or lawyers or, for that matter, butlers—is just one big groveling disgrace.
Uncommonly timely ... Bullough offers suggestions on how to tackle the situation, such as standardising regulations across all British territories, policing financial crime at the national level and treating whistleblowers better. But underlying his righteous anger and acerbic wit there’s an underlying tone of defeat.
England today, Bullough proposes, 'is like a butler,' a figure who 'does not concern himself with the moral character of his clients.' That may be a little unfair to butlers, not such a bad lot in my limited experience, and what Bullough really means is that, beyond financial and legal services, London is also selling the remains of its cultural capital: the deference or obsequiousness of its professional class conferring on their business associates an aura of respectability or patrician glamour. The more apt word for members of this class would be enabler or opportunist: Butler to the World is really a story about the legacy of empire and the sorry state of a country that finds itself acting as a factotum for the international plutocracy ... Bullough describes a system before the 1950s in which 'financial institutions were largely guided by gentle pressure toward doing the ‘right thing,’' with no need for formal agreements, since 'a chap’s word was his bond.' But the City lost its global financial supremacy to Wall Street after two world wars ... In some rather predictable passages, Bullough derides the antiquated patrician elite who used to run the City, and he illustrates what he thinks was their haughty condescension to social inferiors by describing their tendency to address people by their surnames ... In one respect, Bullough’s book is more topical than he could have imagined when it went to press ... At the time of writing, we have just learned that the Conservative Party received a major donation from a Russian source, with links to the pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politician Sergei Kopytov. While this may be an example of how Bullough’s 'butler' analogy doesn’t quite work—a butler accepts tips from guests but doesn’t run the country—it illustrates in the most lurid way a larger story.
A scathing portrait ... Eye-opening ... A stinging case for developing a regulatory regime to force the U.K. 'to seek a different way to earn a living.'
[An] impressively detailed and frequently enraging exposé ... Lucid explanations of complex financial matters and a simmering sense of outrage distinguish this timely investigation into how Britain sacrificed its principles for pounds.
