Lipwig - Civil Service

Civil Service

In Going Postal, Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork arranged to have Lipwig survive his hanging. When Lipwig woke up, Vetinari offered him a job as Ankh-Morpork's Postmaster General which Lipwig could take or reject of his own free will (the alternative being, essentially, death, again of his own free will). At that time, the city's postal service was failing. The task of restoring it had claimed the lives of four of Vetinari's clerks, and the competing and mercilessly corporate Clacks network, the Grand Trunk Clacks Company, was being run by a conman, Reacher Gilt. Lipwig nonetheless manages to revive the postal service by applying the principles of the con to honest work, introduces the postage stamp and causes the downfall of the Grand Trunk Clacks Company by exposing the fraudulent practices introduced by Gilt. By the beginning of Making Money, the Clacks network is run by the Ankh-Morpork Postal Service.

Moist, and the Post Office, has a very minor cameo in Thud!. Commander Vimes notices that the Ankh-Morpork Post Office has issued two different sets of stamps commemorating the Battle of Koom Valley, one in which the Dwarfs are winning the battle, the other the Trolls, and he makes an angry remark about "that pea-brain at the Post Office" (probably referring to Stanley, the Head of Stamps Dept, who's known to have been raised by peas). He also mentions the cabbage stamp with the potentially explosive cabbage scented glue, of which Corporal Nobbs has confiscated many examples.

In Making Money, the Patrician offers Moist the additional job of running the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork and the Royal Mint just behind it. He refuses this offer, but when the chairwoman of the bank dies, she leaves all her shares to her dog Mr Fusspot, and the dog to Moist and alerts the Assassins' Guild to the situation who would kill Lipwig should he refuse the job. Therefore he becomes responsible for the bank. Moist becomes the Master of the Royal Mint then introduces paper money to Ankh-Morpork and revolutionises the bank, whilst keeping it out of the hands of the greedy Lavish family who sit on the board of directors.

Lipwig's next project is likely to be a reform of the Ankh-Morpork tax system in the anticipated future Discworld novel Raising Taxes.