At a time when voters are raging about greedy, self-serving elites, you’d think those in power would want to avoid playing to type. You’d be wrong. José Manuel Barroso, former president of the European Commission, has a new job at Goldman Sachs, the bank that “helped Greece mask its fatal debt problems”. He has nor alone. Between 2009 and 2010 alone, six out of 13 departing EU commissioners moved into new corporate or lobbying roles. Further signs of the beginning of the end of the EU as we know it?

Such revolving-door practices aren’t confined to Brussels. The UK has long been the European market leader when it comes to ex-politicians and civil servants taking handsomely paid roles related directly to their former jobs. A recent report found 25 ex-ministers in the coalition government had taken paid roles in sectors they once oversaw. Former energy minister Ed Davey now advises the lobby firm that helps EDF, the French energy giant to whom he awarded the contract for Hinkley Point C power station. It’s shameless and brazen, but these people don’t care what we think, and don’t think they have to, either. No wonder angry populism is bubbling across Europe. (prompted by an article by John Harris, The Guardian, reproduced in The Week).

Under an Epicurean government (yes, a contradiction in terms) it would be illegal for anyone to take a senior job in a company which he or she had overseen or regulated while in a position of government power, and the organisation that tried to employ them would be banned from the corridors of power (although, how can companies be blamed if they find back doors into influence? It’s the whole system that is wrong). This slimey “thank you” for past services rendered should be halted – it brings government into disrepute. Ditto in the US.