“We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” Thus spoke the late Leona Helmsley, the billionaire New York hotel owner known as the “Queen of Mean”, en route to federal prison for tax evasion. Silly her. If she had resided as a non-domiciled person in the UK, she need not have paid tax at all, at least in the UK, though as a US citizen she would still have been pursued by the land of the far from fiscally free.

How different things are in the mother country. And what a huge lobbying effort there has been to keep it so. The view that only little people pay taxes has been advanced with passion. Does the private equity business pay tax on its income at 10 per cent? Quite right too. Do entrepreneurs turn their income into capital gains, also taxed at 10 per cent? Right, again. Do 130,000 people live in the UK, many for decades, without paying tax on their foreign income. Absolutely right. Change these arrangements and the sky will fall in, we are told, or at least it will be the end of the City of London, the art market and the business of luxury.