A new government has been elected and, as usual, savings must be made in the public service. Some individuals in the Department of Multifarious, Extraneous and Artistic Affairs will go to any lengths to be made redundant and to leave with lucre, but Alan Mewling is not one of them; he is unashamedly desperate to avoid bureaucratic irrelevance. At the very time, though, when he needs to demonstrate his indispensability to senior management, his domestic life descends into chaos, his work colleagues behave in increasingly strange ways and he is the target of bizarre romantic overtures. He finds himself tasked with solving impossible problems and with serving each of the warring parties in an industrial dispute made intractable by that most feared of clerical crises: the stationery freeze. Will he be able to save his job, his identity and his sense of purpose, or will he - after years of selfless service - be obliged to hang up his cardigan? If anyone can prevail with dignity in such testing circumstances, it is surely A. A. C. Mewling.