So, I told you about my early start in life and taken you through some career highlights. There have been lowlights, of course. Losing friends and best friends, getting picked on, and being bullied—not just when I was young, but also by vindictive colleagues who seek to work the system of being noticed.

Let me tell you about the corporate desk-jockeys I encountered after leaving the Royal Navy. They thought playing at being leaders could cover up a total lack of spine, and they taught me a brutal, involuntary lesson about integrity.

The "Chosen Man"


I had been with the firm for seven years, originally riding the wave of being the new boy in a procurement team. The guy who managed me for the first six of those years ran the place with a style straight out of TV's The Apprentice, operating under the classic, hollow banner of: "My door is always open."

Let’s call him Peter. He was what I borrow from my eponymous hero, Richard Sharpe (from the Bernard Cornwell books), as a "Chosen Man." In the British Army, Sharpe’s Chosen Men were elite; they could fire three shots in a minute and hit the heart every time.

In the corporate world, my definition is a bit darker. Peter had been with the business long before it was acquired by one of the world's largest defence firms. He was a fixture. He was part of the furniture. These "Chosen Men" are the people who become completely untouchable through corporate transitions; they are never the ones who get terminated, no matter what they do wrong. But they can fire you in less than three shots.

For six years, I dealt with Peter. He took all the credit for my hard work, but if it helped me achieve my goal of making the firm look good at global customs practices, I let it slide. Within my first year, we passed a major government audit. From there, I set my sights on achieving a prestigious customs trust status called Authorised Economic Operator (AEO). Back then, it was brand new—a real future differentiator for any business seeking rapid clearance through international borders.

I researched the fine print and presented it to the executive board. Their response was the classic corporate shrug: "What's in it for me? If you want to do it, go ahead, but we are not giving you any more resources or money."

A Basket of Fruit and a Laptop


So, I took it on like a side challenge. But balancing the US "mothership" based in Washington, managing an Australian project, and building the AEO framework from scratch meant relentless early mornings and late nights. The exhaustion took a heavy toll.

One weekend, I was gripped by severe chest pains. I went to the hospital on Saturday, but they sent me home, saying it was probably nothing. By Monday, I was desperate. My resident GP wasn't available, so I saw a locum. After making me walk up and down the room and asking if I’d been on a flight, she didn't hesitate: "I'm sending you directly to A&E with suspected pneumonia."

It turned out to be pleurisy. After three days in a hospital bed, I came out weary, weak, and incredibly fragile. Waiting for me at home was a get-well gesture from my firm: a basket of fruit, and my work laptop!

That should have told me everything I needed to know. I was a single point of failure. Their business model wasn't strong enough to handle an important absence, so even while my lungs were recovering, the machine demanded to be fed.

But life went on. I got the firm their AEO status. I won the CEO’s award for "Shaping the Future," and I was nominated for the company's "Night of the Stars" among other elite employees.

That hard-won AEO status made our firm eligible to bid for an incredibly lucrative contract with the U.K. Ministry of Defence involving customs warehousing and duty reliefs. Against the odds, we won it, beating out major global businesses that had invested far more time and money.

And that is exactly when the leadership changed, Peter stepped aside, and "Joe Soap" showed up to take over my role.

Enter Joe Soap


If Peter was the immovable "Chosen Man," Joe Soap—let’s call him Barry—was the toxic parasite that breeds in big corporate mergers. He came in late 2017, and he managed me for a brief, miserable six months leading up to May 2018.

Barry was a master of the corporate dark arts. He was a typical toady, Machiavellian to the core, smoothing up to the right people, holding whispering, closed-door one-on-ones, and somehow, everybody seemed to adore him, especially the female cohort. To me, he was transparently shifty. He spent an uncomfortable amount of time watching people—especially the female staff—and yet, the office still loved him.

Six months in, just as I thought I might finally be granted a secure position for everything I had delivered to this newly merged defence giant, I was hit by an out-of-the-blue ethics interview.

The accusation? I was bullying my subordinates.

Never in my entire life—including 28 proud years of service in the Royal Navy—had I ever been accused of bullying.

The bomb was dropped just as I was about to take a few days of pre-planned leave. When I returned, the nightmare escalated. HR initiated a full-blown kangaroo court where I was forced to defend my character. Drowning in stress, I asked Barry if he would act as my character representative. He looked me in the eye and refused, claiming he had a "conflict of interest."

We were actively chasing the HMRC end of the warehousing contract at the time, and the firm desperately needed my expertise to make the legal case. The pressure was suffocating. Then came the ultimate betrayal.

As the HR paperwork was laid out, I saw who had made statements against me. One was a young girl whose only job had been delivering departmental mail; I had pulled her up, brought her into my team, and mentored her.

Worse still, the primary statement came from the man I had chosen to be the Best Man at my 2017 wedding. He wasn't the sharpest tool in the box, and I had been his mentor since he joined. I befriended him, secured his job, and three years later, I literally wrote the CV that got him his promotion. Because I didn't have many close friends outside of work at the time, I gave him the highest honour a mate can give.

What a fool I was. He had used me to secure his own future, and now he was calling me aggressive to save his own skin under Barry's new regime.

Escorted from the Building


The days became an exhausting, intimidating blur of trials. I kept fighting, believing sanity would prevail, until a final complaint was lodged over the weekend: Apparently, I had threatened Joe Soap with jail time.

The twisted irony of that accusation still burns. What actually happened was one of Barry's infamous closed-door sessions. He had asked me what would happen if he simply ignored the legal requirement for export licenses to speed up customer transfers. As a compliance professional, I gave him the straight, unvarnished legal truth: "That would not be good. If proven, a company director could face ten years in jail."

He took a professional, legal warning meant to protect the company and weaponized it into a personal threat against his life.

When you go through an HR investigation, you eventually get to see the paperwork. You get to see who pulled the trigger. And there it was in black and white: The very first complaint had been lodged by Joe Soap himself.

Barry had started the fire, then systematically manipulated and swayed a vulnerable team of my own mentees to stack up enough manufactured evidence to give HR the ammunition they wanted.

In May 2018, I was escorted out of the building like a criminal.

I left having given that firm their biggest contractual victory, and in return, I was left with no income, a damaged reputation, and no further pension. I was 60 years old. Who on earth employs a compliance manager accused of bullying at 60?

My step-daughter picked me up from the office that afternoon. I climbed into the passenger seat of her car, looked at her, and completely broke down. My life, my career, and my reputation felt entirely over.

Poem

The Machiavellian Monster

Seek and destroy, the fragile man,
Take everything from him, when you can.
Use the tools that made you Joe,
Take him out, he’ll never know.

Ho, ho! For the schemers in grey,
They steal your life, and they walk away!

Smooth tongue, polished shoes, a flawless disguise,
He rules through the whispers and feeds upon lies.
He pulls at the threads while the innocent fall,
And grins as he leaves you with back to the wall.

Yo, ho! For the corporate thieves,
Who smile to your face while the innocent grieves!

He sits in his court with a heart made of stone,
He turns all your friends till you’re standing alone.
A handshake, a promise, a blade in the spine—
He traded your life just to build up his own.

Yo, ho! For the rats on the deck,
They scuttle the ship and they cash in their cheque!