You often hear of people being “trapped in poverty”, but it is also possible to be trapped in wealth. This is David Cameron’s fate. He is not a financially greedy man, or stinking rich, but he comes from a background in which hereditary wealth is the norm; his wife Samantha even more so. He does not think such wealth is wrong – if he did, he would have an easy remedy: get rid of it – but he finds it embarrassing. He also knows that it can make him politically vulnerable.

Once he began, years ago, to play along with the essentially Left-wing idea that private money is suspect and that tax-planning and legal avoidance are immoral, he was trapped. Now everything he has done in this area is made to look dodgy. Yet it is little different from saving in a tax-free ISA or even buying duty-free drink.

So when Mary Cameron gave her son two gifts of £100,000 each, she was doing two normal, ethically acceptable things. First, she was giving her son money at a time when – what with having young children and being a politician rather than a businessman – his expenses were rising and his income wasn’t. Second, she was giving it to him in the hope that she would live another seven years and so he could get that bit of his inheritance in full, rather than taxed at 40 per cent. This was reasonable – kind, indeed – and it would have been absurd for Mr Cameron to have refused it.