What does Mariana Mazzucato, a fiery professor of economics with left-of-centre views, have in common with Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s maverick erstwhile adviser? Both believe that the consulting industry ‘infantilizes’ civil servants and wastes taxpayers’ money. Cummings tried two years ago to change that by setting up an in-house public sector consultancy, based in the Cabinet Office. But civil servants, it turned out, preferred to use consultancy firms such as PwC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG. In January, it shut.

Mazzucato, together with Rosie Collington, her doctoral student, has written a book that records the many ways in which consultants make themselves indispensable to governments and explores some of the times when governments have rued recruiting these hugely expensive advisers. The authors set out the case for the prosecution with articulate ferocity. The consulting industry ‘enables the actualization of a particular view of the economy that has created dysfunctions in government and business around the world’, they complain. They have certainly done their research: almost a quarter of the book (index apart) is made up of bibliography and notes.

The authors are mainly concerned with the impact of consulting on government. They make three particularly powerful complaints. Consultants, they argue, suck talent out of governments and businesses; they avoid blame for failure while making money from success; and they blur the line between government and the private sector