"But it turns out the looters include a teaching assistant, a postman, a champion balloon bender with seven A-levels and perhaps not surprisingly, His Grace the Duke of Kent.

"Meanwhile many of these kids are less than two miles away from people who get multi-million pound bonuses for catastrophic failure and live in a culture where the material excess of people who are famous for nothing is rammed relentlessly into their faces by middle-brow tabloid newspapers.

"And of course later today the looters will be condemned in Parliament by a bunch of people who stole money by accident.

"Arseholery begets arseholery.