The Ways We Live Now

Enter the shocking world of the modern senior Civil Service where the power to award enormous contracts can lead to massive corruption, fuelled by personal greed and commercial fraud. In this novel of our times and ways of life, this cosy world of mutual protection and closing ranks against outsiders is laid bare – a world made possible by a culture of wilful blindness. The senior civil servants are bound together by a code of not just looking the other way but of deliberately avoiding any investigation of other senior civil servants’ activities. Highly intelligent and immensely capable, they live in a world where they know they have almost bullet-proof protection.

Exposure is what they dread and they move heaven and earth to prevent any of their fellow senior civil servants being subject to criticism or censure – as they know that their own wrong doing will be similarly protected by a wall of indifference and silence. Backed up by half-truths, cover-ups, misleading statements and downright lies, they live charmed lives where even if there is overwhelming evidence of corruption, they know they will come through unscathed and with their pensions and their honours untouched.

Like Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”, which laid bare the fraud and corruption of George Hudson, the Railway King and developer of enormous Ponzi schemes in the 1850s, The Ways We Live Now lays bare Civil Service corruption, wilful blindness, commercial fraud, and personal greed in the twenty first century – and shows how retribution and penalties can be manipulated by the most senior people to protect themselves.