At the age of 11, I was discovering a lot about life. Pogo sticks on Big Brother. How many piles of livestock had to burn to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth. Record use of gameshow gunge on CITV’s Twister. Daniel Radcliffe. What happens when planes are hijacked by something called al-Qaeda. The fantasy world of Artemis Fowl. How to navigate a Bunsen burner. How to navigate secondary school in general (especially with a rucksack so big it trapped me in doorframes). But perhaps the defining moment of 2001 for me was the Coughing Major.
As soon as police began investigating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? winner Charles Ingram for potentially cheating by using the coughs of audience accomplices to signal the right answers, I was gripped by what fast became a national obsession. I’ve replayed the infamous episode, seen every documentary on the scandal, read Jon Ronson’s reportage from the trial, and watched James Graham’s play Quiz at the West End. The timbre and cadence of the most contentious coughs still echo in my head. I’m sure many Brits can still remember the spluttered cough-NO! from fellow defendant Tecwen Whittock when Ingram was blithely concluding that Haussmann planned the city of Berlin. When that specific recording was played as evidence at the trial, laughter filled the court.
The case of the Coughing Major seems to me to be the seed that planted the great artificial tree of True Grift, a genre that since the turn of the millennium has regularly gripped Britons in an exquisite state of schadenfreude. From British Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler and the endless entertainment provided by Captain Tom’s descendants, to Oxbridge-bothering scammer Caroline Calloway and the unravelling of bestselling memoir The Salt Path, we are as a country fascinated by grift-gone-wrong.
There is almost something innocent about it. While True Crime, its grislier cousin, can feel ethically a bit grubby, True Grift feels okay to gawp at. A fraudster or fantasist getting their comeuppance seems more palatable as entertainment than a hideous crime unsolved. And stories like that of fake heiress Anna Delvey, Fyre Festival’s unmet hype and the miracle Theranos blood test-that-never-was are almost made for the podcast-documentary-drama industrial complex that haunts our modern consumption habits. Long-form treatment for the even longer-nosed.
There are many more international exports I could list, but our homegrown True Grift genre is something quite specific – The Salt Path perhaps being the ideal form. For those who have avoided all roads saline this year, a quick recap. A memoir is released in 2018 by Raynor Winn, who walks the South West Coast Path with her husband, Moth. They have lost their home farm following a friend’s business betrayal, and he has been diagnosed with a fatal illness. Starting out again, they find resilience and kindness through long walks.
It’s a neat yet fantastical story: what the New Statesman labelled “Scientology for the middle classes”. Ideal, therefore, for cinema – and a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs based on the book was duly released in 2024. But this year, an Observer exposé suggested Winn stole from her employer and cast doubt on Moth’s diagnosis (claims she denies). The paper has since published further allegations undermining the memoir, now culminating in a documentary on Sky. The full True Grift package.
This is very much a classic of the genre, in Britain at least. From the fall of Charles Ingram – a privately educated British Army major – to the questions facing Raynor Winn, there is a golden narrative thread we cannot resist: the middle-class setback. The Salt Path has lived and died by that same arresting premise. In telling the tale of a middle-class couple reduced to living on tax credits and only the occasional cream tea, it has morphed into a chronicle of two people who have done phenomenally well for themselves coming undone. Captain Tom’s daughter, with her illegal spa, has faced the same fate. (I am sure it’s this mildly classist attention to campy detail that deepened the fixation over the investigation into SNP finances. It wasn’t the crime scene tent outside Nicola Sturgeon’s house; it was the fact she lived in a suburban newbuild semi and “designer pots and pans” were on the search warrant. Teflon won out though – she was dropped from the case.)
The appeal of True Grift is hardly surprising. As I have written before, we are living in an Age of Grift – of fraud being the most common crime committed in England and Wales, and rogue influencers constantly trying to sell us pointless things and bad ideas. With our social media algorithms clogged up with parenting myths, wellness guff and crypto junk, it’s no wonder we tune in when we learn of someone being caught out amid all the spin.
“Grifter” is now a popular insult – hurled constantly between public figures, from the Sussexes and Zarah Sultana to Nigel Farage and Jolyon Maughan. In 2017-24, its written use more than doubled. The word even made its debut in parliament this year. The story of the Salt Path belongs to us all: an audience being spun in a world of grifters – so willing to be sold the dream of self-improvement, yet still yearning for the fall of those who fulfil it.
[Further reading: Sentimental Value is an extraordinary investigation into generational trauma]
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