Should Chris Moyles be taught a lesson?

Would you buy a used car from the disc jockey Chris Moyles? I’m fairly gullible but even I’d have second thoughts if the gobby lardmountain approached me with a 2004 Nissan Micra, one careful owner mate, sound as a pound. This is what Moyles told the Inland Revenue he did for a living so that he could save one million quid in tax. What he was actually doing was presenting various unspeakably awful radio programmes for obscene amounts of money. He has been told by a tribunal – which his legal team tried to have held in camera, so as to protect the oaf’s foundering career – to pay the money back.

But doesn’t this kind of ‘mistake’, as Moyles calls it, merit a stiffer lesson? Let’s accept, as we must, that Moyles believed that the scheme was legal. That doesn’t change the fact he was trying to dodge tax in a way that is the very definition of shiftiness.