Hypocrisy has always been the glaring vice of the progressive metropolitan elite. These sanctimonious moralisers adore giving lectures about ethical behaviour, yet so often they indulge in the very practices they so fiercely condemn.

They shriek about the need for more taxation while setting up their own complex avoidance schemes. They wail about environmental damage while jetting round the globe. And they pontificate about Britain’s housing crisis while building their own expensive property portfolios.

Now another champion of brazen Left-wing double standards has emerged in the form of Shami Chakrabarti, the human rights lawyer and newly-created Labour peer.