English civil law has become a luxury good beyond the reach of most of us

In March 2020, Charlotte Leslie, a former Conservative MP, and widely regarded as a thoughtful, friendly woman, had her life turned upside down. The threat of professional and financial ruin hit her, and stayed with her until a few months ago, solely because she had offended a wealthy man.

Leslie was the director of the Conservative Middle East Council. Mohamed Amersi, a businessman worth hundreds of millions of pounds, appeared from nowhere and announced that he wanted to become the council’s chairman. Leslie politely showed him the door. The next thing she knew, Amersi had set up a rival Middle East organisation to liaise between the Conservative party and the oil-rich states of the Gulf. Who is this guy, she thought, and why are senior figures in my party asking me to accommodate him?

She googled Amersi and found that his rival organisation recruited Russian nationals. She continued searching and discovered that Amersi had advised on a telecoms deal with a company that was later found to be controlled by an associate of Putin. Leslie sent a memo that contained nothing except publicly available information about Amersi to senior Conservative figures, diplomats and intelligence officers.

Tom Burgis’s Cuckooland expands on the contents of that memo to provide a rip-roaring account of the overweening power of money. Amersi was born in Kenya, with an Indian-Iranian background. He needed a guide through the British Establishment, and there was no better one for hire in the first decade of this century than Ben Elliot, who ran Quintessentially, a ‘concierge’ service that supplied the wealthy with every luxury. In 2013 Elliot arranged for Amersi to travel to Scotland to dine with Prince Charles, as he then was, whose wife Camilla happened to be Elliot’s aunt.