Well some taxdodgers, not all of them, obviously...
After Jimmy Carr they went after Frankie Boyle, but according to Boyle they got their facts just a little muddled, or as he put it, the story was bollocks.

The Mail story
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -Carr.html

Frankie's riposte
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/06 ... lp00000003

The Mail article is a typically nasty, mendacious smearing piece. It has the fingermarks of Dacre all over it and of course it fits one of the Mail's major themes, the 'exposure' and destruction of any public figure about whom they can manufacture any spiteful, petty negative stories.

Have they done Tony Blair yet? Private Eye is rather overegging him changing his year end. For me this comes very much in the category of something anyone can do.

Everything being objected to seems to be completely legal. Which makes the calls on Twitter for Carr to be sued, prosecuted, defenestrated or immolated amusing.

ha, ha.

I think the line for me is "could anyone do this?". Blair and Livingstone's "dodges" are OK. Carr's aren't.

At least the Blair year end one. Said to be some other strange complexities.

It's like the expenses scandal. People got very angry at a large number of people who had done nothing outside of the rules without ever asking where the rules came from or whether or not they were sensible. A sort of sophisticated shooting the messenger, with added calls for the reintroduction of the tumbrils.

Yeah. And zoomed in on people with silly sounding items rather than the ones who spent up to the max. Or in the case of this MP, spent up to the max that didn't require receipts:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... -bill.html

He did it every month. No problem with being reselected and re-elected.

I think there's a couple of things going on there. First, people wouldn't get so worked up about claims they could contemplate making themselves (TVs, mortgage relief) as they would about those which were either socially taboo or symbolised some sort of class difference (porn, duck houses, moat cleaning etc). Second, the amounts of money were not as important as the mental images conjured up. £60,000 spent on something understandable as defined above elicited less bemusement or outrage as the 'taboo' claims, or the very petty ones. I think it boils down to both journalists and the public as a whole having a better head for visual imagery than numerical data. After all, it's easier to visualise or draw a duck house than it is to draw a mortgage.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.