Earlier this year I interviewed Oliver Bullough, Britain’s foremost investigator of dodgy foreign money and presumably Journalist Most Likely to Have No Knee Caps, 2025. We spoke at one point about how London’s string-pullers and financiers had been, for a long time, perfectly happy to launder plutocratic cash and reputations for fat fees and Château Lafite; to use their connections to find oligarchs Eaton Square mansions and help them dodge taxes; to play some sinister Jeeves to a succession of war-profiteering, rival-assassinating, natural-resource-pillaging Woosters.
Most of these agents, Bullough says, had been quietly aware that this sort of baddy butlering wouldn’t make for a credible public image. “There is an element of ‘While the music is playing, keep dancing, but stand near the door’ about it all,” he tells me—i.e, make lots of money while the going is good, but get out quickly once the men in windbreakers show up. And, sure enough, even before the sanctions on oligarchs were slapped into place following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, most of these smiling middlemen had receded into the background, emerging with nothing more than a healthy bonus and some good stories for the clubhouse.
