John Dene of Toronto: A Comedy of Whitehall

John Dene arrives at the British Admiralty with a weapon that could sink German U-boats and a complete inability to follow protocol. The Toronto inventor storms into Whitehall expecting to save the war, only to discover that the real enemy isn't German at all: it's the endless corridor of bureaucrats who demand forms in triplicate before considering anything so vulgar as innovation. His combination of Canadian bluntness and magnificent audacity turns the entire machinery of British officialdom into a farce. A beautiful suffragette, a catastrophically incompetent civil servant, and a suspiciously interested German spy circle around Dene as he attempts to navigate dinners, dances, and the deadly serious business of getting someone to simply look at his plans. Jenkins writes with the precision of a man who deeply understood both the absurdity of wartime bureaucracy and the particular madness of asking British gentility to consider a practical idea.