WHO in their right mind would entertain spending a minute reading about individuals who 99 per cent of humanity should treat with utter contempt?

No doubt prompted by the motto “know thine enemy,” Darryl Cunningham has.

In Billionaires, he homes in on the odious individuals repackaged with a “celeb” veneer and force-fed to the population by a largely dumbed-down mass media to uncover their unscrupulous and often criminal deeds.

The Cunningham spotlight focuses on a trio, all US-based, who have ruined — and continue to ruin — the lives of millions as they “globalise” their activities.

Rupert Murdoch’s gutter-media empire supported Margaret Thatcher in her class war against trade unions and later spoon-fed policy to Tony Blair as he abandoned the working class to its fate.

The media mogul is an arch-manipulator, hell-bent on feeding the basest instincts and encouraging all manner of social prejudice and in Donald Trump — equally lacking in moral standards — Murdoch has found a willing sidekick.

The Koch brothers are perhaps lesser known but their vast petrochemicals empire is the world’s single largest polluter.

Their family eagerly supported nazi Germany and, for good measure, founded the ultra-reactionary John Birch Society, dedicated to supporting anti-communism and “limited” government.

The Kochs father died of a heart attack in 1967 and his sons’ spectacular orgy of back-stabbing over the inheritance is like a darkly comical King Lear.

Jeff Bezos’s Amazon takes the biscuit as a model of relentless and vicious exploitation of workers on zero-hours contracts and Cunningham makes good use of James Bloodworth’s Hired, which details his experience of working in an Amazon depot, to disabuse any idea that such places are anything other than glorified labour camps.

As a writer and illustrator, Cunningham excels and there’s an irresistible symbiosis between the words and the minimalist drawings. The graphic characterisation of all these betes noires are beautifully succinct, the frame composition immaculate and the sparse use of flat colour adds clarity.

This is a most timely book, particularly as rebellion against the pollution of the environment ought to go hand in hand with the pollution of our minds.

Billionaires is published by Myriad, £16.99.