My guest is Simon Cooper.

Simon Cooper is an author and Financial Times journalist, and his latest book, Good Chaps,

How Corrupt Politicians Broke Our Law and Institutions, and What We Can Do About It,

has just been published.

Welcome to the podcast, Simon.

Thank you for having me, Paul.

Right. I should say welcome back, but it's exactly

two years when we had our conversation about your earlier book, Chums, how a tiny cast of Oxford

Tories took over the UK. I'm right in saying this is a, this latest book, Good Chaps, is a kind of

companion piece to follow on from the Chums book.

Yeah, it's really about that generation of politicians.

So the conservatives who've ruled the UK for the last 15 years, 14 years,

and how in their time, but also under Tony Blair, corruption began to rise in British public life and why that is and what we can do about it. The benefit of our listeners may be outside the UK, you may not be

totally familiar with the phrase. What is the definition of good chaps?

In good chaps, it's really a historical concept. It's the figure from the post-war decades who, a British public schoolboy who'd been to Oxbridge

and then had fought in the war, came home from war with the belief that the highest thing

you could do in your life was serve the British state.

So these are people like Harold McMillan, Ted Heath, Anthony Eden.

Heath wasn't a public school boy, but most of them were,

who had had very heroic wars and then really went into public service.

So some of them became politicians or senior civil servants, BBC executives, military people,

but really the idea of public service was the paramount ethos in their life.

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