How my brother-in-law Boris got me cancelled

Nigel Farage and I don’t have too much in common beyond liking a pint and a cigar. Yet I now discover a link: we are both PEPs, or ‘politically exposed persons’. Such a handle may not be a total surprise to Nigel. (He may not have been surprised, either, when Coutts said that it had closed his bank account simply because he didn’t have enough funds.) But it certainly was to me – especially as I found out from an official at the bureau de change in the baggage hall of Mexico City airport.

As I proffered a couple of grubby $100 bills to change to pesos, I filled in a short form – name, address etc – then noticed the cashier looking quizzically at my passport. He called over a supervisor. My passport was analysed by a machine. After a few buzzes, bleeps and whirrs, a new form, almost identical to the first, was presented. But as I laboriously listed once again the address of my hotel, I noticed there was an additional question at the bottom. Was I a politically exposed person, it asked.

As Basil Fawlty’s Manuel might say: ‘Qué?’ There was, after all, no explanation of what that might actually mean. No definition of what such a person might look like. Surely anyone bored daily by the Today programme or a slave to the births and deaths column in the Times could claim to be, at least to some extent, politically exposed.

Clearly that was not my Mexican friend’s line of inquiry. But as a man in his seventies – an OAP PEP perhaps – surely I couldn’t be too much of a threat to the government of President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador.