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.

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.

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.

Uncommonly timely.

A scathing portrait.

[An] impressively detailed and frequently enraging exposé.