There are still five unresolved financial scandals with connections to Nicolas Sarkozy, any one of which might yet prevent him securing the nomination for his party to contest next year’s French presidential election. Hillary Clinton is accused of being on the take from Wall Street to an extent that is kept from the American public, on whose votes she will depend next November; her prestidigitation over her use of private emails causes many of her opponents, not just in the Republican party, to think she might land a federal indictment before the election.

And when it comes to manipulating the tax system, few do it better than politicians. One of the more ill-fated appointments of President Hollande’s disastrous regime was his junior finance minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, whose main role was to stop tax fraud. Nine months into his job he was forced to resign over allegations that he himself was a tax-dodger, and after some bluster about his innocence finally admitted he had had a secret offshore bank account for the previous 20 years. He also starred in the Panama Papers, along with the late Ian Cameron, for owning a network of tax-avoiding companies.

Chuck into the mix politicians as geographically diverse as Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and Silvio Berlusconi, and you see that arch-kleptocrats such as Putin do not have the field to themselves. It was all a bit of a laugh for the British when this was something only Johnny Foreigner got up to: we could chortle over our newspapers and say, smugly, that however incompetent our political leaders might be, at least we could trust them. That theory is now being severely, and it seems unsuccessfully, tested.