Hands, face, space. Curfews. Don't drink. Bend your knees. Conform, obey, comply - surrender. British life has become infested by bossiness.

Boris Johnson won power as one of life's free-wheelers but his first year as PM saw a fever of finger-wagging. The real pandemic? Passive-aggressive ninnying by politicians, scientists and officialdom. From Sage with its graphs to BBC grandees telling us not to sing 'Rule Britannia', the National Trust with its slavery mania, to calorie counts on menus: why won't they leave us alone? Theatre directors beat us over the head with their agitprop. Militant cyclists scream at us from their saddles. Meghan Markle ticks us off for not being more Californian.

Bossiness: did it begin when Moses came down from the mountain with his tablets? Cromwell beat Chris Whitty to it by four centuries and banned Christmas. A. Hitler, B. Mussolini and J.V. Stalin: they liked to throw their weight around, but today's self-serving dictators are more subtle. They do it with a caring smile. Tell us it's for our own good. They claim to be liberals!

Following his best-selling Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain and his 2017 Christmas favourite Patronising Bastards, parliamentary sketchwriter Quentin Letts storms back into hard covers with a vituperative howl against the 'bossocracy'. They tell us what to do, what to say, how to think. Letts gives them a prolonged, resonant raspberry. He names the guilty men and women: Dominic Cummings, Prof Neil Ferguson, that strutting self-polisher Nicola Sturgeon, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cressida Dick, Michael Gove, even the sainted Sir David Attenborough. Bang! They all take a barrel. And then there's publicity-prone plonker Matt Hancock posing for photographs while doing his 'Mr Fit' press-ups.

Reasonable people have had enough of being bossed about. And when reasonable people stop respecting the law, society has a problem.

About the Author
Quentin Letts is political sketch writer for The Times and theatre critic for the Sunday Times. A regular broadcaster on radio and television, he was formerly New York correspondent for The Times, gossip columnist for the Daily Telegraph and parliamentary sketch writer for the Daily Mail. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain. His hobbies are gossip, hymn-singing and cricket. He lives in rural Herefordshire.

Reviews
As witty as he's defiantly unwoke, the inimitable Quentin Letts dares to say in a new book what we've all been secretly thinking * Mail on Sunday *
Underneath the jocularity of Letts's style is a lot of real anger -- Roger Lewis * The Times *
Brilliantly critical, but always warm-hearted and fair -- Rory Knight Bruce * The Field *
Parliamentary sketch-writer Letts gives a short, punchy account of how small-minded officials, virtue-signalling corporations and craven politicians are ruining Britain. His invective will have you fuming and chuckling by turns * Daily Telegraph *



Book Information
ISBN 9780349135182
Author Quentin Letts
Format Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint Constable
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Weight(grams) 380g
Dimensions(mm) 220mm * 142mm * 28mm