A diplomatic racket

In my Observer column on Sunday I mentioned in passing that in a crisis, elites have to be able to show that they are sharing the plight of the masses. Asking for ‘equality of suffering’ is too much, you will never have that, but there has to be a sense that — to coin a phrase — we are all in this together.

Christine Lagarde had just lectured the Greeks on why they must pay their taxes. She was in no way inhibited by the knowledge that as an official of the IMF she was a ‘diplomatic agent’ and hence exempt from taxes under the terms of the 1961 Berne Convention. The inevitable accusation from the Greeks that she was a hypocrite so lost in a world of privilege she could no longer know a double-standard when she saw it, took her and her colleagues aback.

But not all of them.