A big hand for the two-faced tax hacks

Something odd happened at the Guardian after the paper’s editorial staff were basking in the glow of their just-published splash about the Panama papers. They were understandably excited, having sat on the revelations for months, and were about to put flesh on the bones of the stories that had broken on Sunday evening about the elaborate tax-avoidance schemes of assorted Tory bigwigs. The Guardian was one of 107 media organisations that had been secretly going through the cache of 11.5 million documents stolen from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca and these were the golden nuggets: disclosures guaranteed to cause the government maximum embarrassment and — an added bonus — give a much-needed boost to Jeremy Corbyn. With a bit of luck, the paper’s associate editor Seumas Milne, who is widely disliked on the editorial floor, would remain on secondment to the Labour leader’s office for some time to come.