British public life is sustained by a series of comforting delusions – as became very clear to me during five years writing leaders for a national newspaper, trying to reconcile the stories the country tells itself with the reality of how it is actually run. One of the most enduring national myths is Britain’s self-image as uniquely righteous, free from the corruption that is endemic almost everywhere else. This myth even survived contact with the squalor of the Boris Johnson government; indeed, the ejection of his scandal-ridden regime from office was widely taken as proof that the country’s ‘good chap’ system of government endures.

Of course, as with most national myths, there is a kernel of truth to it. Britain today is, by and large, much less corrupt than most other countries. But that was not always the case. Until the mid-19th century, when Victorian statesmen such as William Gladstone enacted a series of reforms designed to clean up British public life, Britain was riddled with corruption. Public office was widely seen as a form of private property to be exploited for personal gain – not least in the empire, which bequeathed a legacy of corruption to former colonies. Robert Barrington’s contention is that, even today, British public life is not as clean as we would like to think.

In Corrupted Kingdom, the professor of anti-corruption practice at the University of Sussex and former UK head of Transparency International forensically examines all aspects of British public life – including national politics, the royal family, local and devolved governments, the police, the prison service, privatised services and the City –