Britain is run by people
who are bluffing. At the top of our government, our media, the civil service
and business sit men – it’s usually men – whose core skill is talking fast,
writing well, and endeavouring to imbue the purest wind with substance. They
know a little bit about everything, and an awful lot about nothing. We know
because we’ve seen them – and we’ve been those men.
We live in a country where
George Osborne can become a newspaper editor despite never working in news,
squeezing it in alongside five other jobs; where a columnist can go from
calling a foreign head of state a wanker to being Foreign Secretary in six
months; where the minister who holds on to his job for eighteen months has more
experience on the job than the supposedly permanent senior civil servants.
The UK establishment has
signed up to the cult of winging it, of pretending to hold all the aces when
you actually hold a pair of twos. It prizes ‘transferable skills’, rewarding
the general over the specific – and yet across the country we struggle to hire
doctors, engineers, coders and more.
This book chronicles how
the UK became hooked on bluffing, how it became what we teach, what we promote,
and the rules of a game that we all feel the consequences of – and why we have
to stop it..
