Bluffocracy

Description

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..

James Ball has worked in political, data and investigative journalism in the US and UK for BuzzFeed, The Guardian and the Washington Post in a career spanning TV, digital, print and alternative media. His reporting has won the Pulitzer Prize for public service and the British Journalism Award for investigative reporting, among others. He wrote Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World and has co-authored two other books: WikiLeaks: News in the Networked Era and The Infographic History of the World. Andrew Greenway is a former government official who worked in five UK central government departments before reaching the senior civil service at 27. He left the bureaucracy in 2014, and now works as a partner for Public Digital, advising governments and large organisations around the world on institutional reform. He has written on politics and Whitehall for the Guardian, New Statesman and Civil Service World. His first book, a collaboration with former Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude on digital transformation, will be published in April 2018.