BY JOE NUTT
We are living in the age of the charlatan. Plenty of others have drawn attention to how little credible or relevant professional experience, so many members of his Majesty’s current government possess. Whether it’s Rachel from accounts or Bridget from…well nowhere really, if you don’t count mum as your employer; many of those currently exerting considerable power over all our lives appear to have led noticeably unproductive, if not entirely pointless working lives themselves. It is deplorable, self-destructive and insulting to millions of hard working employees, that we have a system of government which values CVs their authors could comfortably scrawl on a Post-it note.
Literature has plenty of models for this all too common breed. Shakespeare gave us Polonius of course, Dickens the magnificently fraudulent Pecksniff, and connoisseurs of the literary charlatan will no doubt quickly recall Anthony Powell’s fabulously successful, chameleonic monstrosity of an MP, Kenneth Widmerpool. So it’s not as though we haven’t been warned. Indeed Pecksniff quickly became so infamous, he gained that extraordinarily rare accolade, eponymous status.
My first major professional encounter with the breed saw me tasked by my then employer, to quality assure an extremely high profile academic who was seeking sponsorship from the company. Alarm bells immediately clanged when in conversation I asked him, as I would any scholar or researcher, to send me links to his published work. He was visibly elusive. Not something I’m used to witnessing from writers of anything. As a breed, authors tend be quite effusive when it comes to their work.
When the time came for me to do my job I found heaps of self-published material online, plenty of appearances and interviews in the mainstream media but however hard I searched, I could not find one, single research paper of any kind, anywhere, never mind peer-reviewed, and not a single book. What was most astounding was he held a senior university position and taught PhD students. I couldn’t even find evidence of his having completed a PhD himself, anywhere. The modern charlatan is nothing, if not confident.
If you are a young professional in your first few years of employment, working genuinely hard to accumulate experience and deliver results employers will value, or one of those genuinely experienced professionals in any field, who agonises over how many pages to cut from your CV with a fussy head hunter, whose keen-edged incentive is 30% of your starting salary, you have every reason to be incensed about this situation. In 2025, after decades of technological involvement in recruitment, and the emergence of the HR professional with a distinct skills set, one would think it would be almost impossible for the charlatan to succeed.
The opposite is of course true because the convergence of those two things has been the means by which charlatans don’t just gain lucrative roles, but thrive. Screens scroll quicker than printed pages turn, and invite far less scrutiny.
In that kind of superficial environment, it is all too easy for a deeply unpleasant cabal of lobbyists and amateurs, like the Private Education Policy Forum, the group many suspect are behind Labour’s current educational catastrophe, to set up a limited company with nothing but a name or two and a website, and even try to pass themselves off as a ‘Think Tank.’ They have no employees, so the idea that they are in any position to offer any kind of professional research service is laughable. Just Stop Oil have more professional credibility.
Sadly, few will bother to put in the effort needed to look behind the on screen claims of charlatans. In the age of the charlatan you can, like Alistair Campbell’s wife, Fiona Millar, have not one iota of relevant professional experience, be incapable of demonstrating any meaningful connection whatsoever with the subject you falsely claim to be expert in, yet still get called upon regularly to give your opinions on something as vital to the nation as education, by a lazy and politically craven media.
The mainstream media is itself of course, especially prone to this weakness, since professional journalists are by definition experts at nothing: masquerading as experts in anything. The popularity of a handful of individual media figures, who you can easily name for yourselves, demonstrates just how deeply enmired we are in the age of the charlatan.
Businesses and other influential national organisations need to get much better at scrutinising those they listen to, if they want to avoid being at best misinformed and at worst conned to the point of organisational, or even, as in the case of perhaps literature’s greatest charlatan, national breakdown.
In a matter of months Shakespeare’s Edmund from King Lear goes from being a barely acknowledged, bastard son, to running the nation; having bedded not one, but two princesses en route. His downfall, when it comes, is not only ugly and ignoble, but quite beautifully just, something Britain currently feels badly in need of.
Joe Nutt writes essays for a wide range of magazines and is the author of several books about the poetry of Donne, Milton and Shakespeare and a collection of essays, The Point of Poetry.