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Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the World’s Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything
Maybe someday
32
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
47/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Oliver Bullough
Publisher:
St. Martin's Press
Date:
June 14, 2022
The Suez Crisis of 1956 was the nadir of Britain's twentieth century, the moment when the once-superpower was bullied into retreat. Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role, said Dean Acherson, a former US secretary of state. Acheson's line has entered into the canon of great quotations: but it was wrong. Britain had already found a role. The leaders of the world just hadn't noticed it yet. Butler to the World reveals how Britain came to assume its role as the center of the offshore economy. Written polemically, but studded with witty references to the butlers of popular fiction, it demonstrates how so many elements of modern Britain have been put at the service of the world's oligarchs.
What The Reviewers Say
Unmissable, deeply depressing.
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.
This highly readable but thoroughly depressing book is an attempt to explain how Britain became the money-laundering capital of the world..
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.
