Dividing his time

I don’t know if you watched the show, but there was a bravura performance from the British historian Simon Schama on Newsnight last Thursday evening. He spent much of the time furiously condemning the venality and greed of the bankers in accepting large bonuses. He was, for a while, wracked by a sort of camp hysteria, spluttering with fury, eyes revolving, hands flailing, in the manner of a nonagenarian dowager aunt addressing the question of immigration.

Mr Schama divides his time, as he admitted, between the US and Britain. I wonder in which of the two countries he prefers to pay his income tax — the UK, where it’s about 50 per cent for the likes of him, or the US, where it’s a more congenial 35 per cent? He would be perfectly within his rights, of course, to pay his taxes in the US and then come over and lecture us all about venality. Just as the bankers are within their rights to accept bonuses.