WANTED: ethics adviser for large public sector management team. No previous knowledge of or commitment to ethics a major plus.
Are you completely new to the field of ethics advising, with no pre-determined ideas about the field? Would you describe yourself as having only a rudimentary moral compass?
Then we want to hear from you. A position has opened up in the heart of government for an ethics adviser happy to spend the majority of their time going unconsulted.
The position, which is well remunerated and prestigious, involves working closely with an international leader who will largely ignore you unless saying ‘get that judgemental prick out of here while we’re talking bribes’.
However, at other times leadership will be keen to have one-on-one conversations with you, particularly focused on high-profile areas of ethical concern the press have discovered.
We need candidates ready to tailor their ethical advice toward the complete exoneration of the leader and his team, no matter how humiliating.
Could you see yourself claiming ‘it is perfectly reasonable’ for a man not to have realised that a gathering of 20 people with drinks and a karaoke machine was a party, even though he attended it?
Or to straightfacedly assert that a man ‘did not question’ who paid £40,000 to wallpaper his own home, despite his repeated emails begging a donor for the money?
The ideal applicant will be flexible, naive, capable of holding two or more contradictory belief simultaneously, and untroubled by matters of conscience. Applications from those with active convictions welcomed. Conversational Russian an advantage.
This position is expected to be open again within nine months, as we are getting through them pretty rapidly at the moment. Send CVs to Whitehall, marked ‘Amoral Bastard’.
