They discuss the difference between liberal and libertarian. It becomes clear that liberalism is the nearest thing that Judith has to a religion. Liberalism is being non-judgmental about people’s sex lives but hyper-judgmental about profits and pollution and fox hunting and Tesco and Margaret Thatcher. Jomier argues that libertarianism is more relaxed than liberalism. Liberalism nags. It fosters an industry of nagging do-gooders who get jobs advertised in Society Guardian that are funded by the state – time servers in education and the social services more interested in their incremental wage increases and pension rights than the development of children or well-being of the poor.

It is now that Judith goes quiet. She lowers her head to hide the furrows in her brow. She does not want to get into an argument with Jomier. She does not want to risk alienating this last available man. She does not yet know Jomier well enough to realise that Jomier argues for the sake of arguing. Arguing has been his profession. If he has opinions, they are contradictory and cancel one another out. As a follow-up question to Pontius Pilate’s ‘What is truth?’ he asks, ‘What is Justice?’ As an idealistic young barrister he had set out to save the innocent from wrongful conviction but the innocent had proved elusive. The clients he defended were always guilty of the crime with which they were charged – drug smuggling, benefit fraud, credit card scams. They were guilty – but could they be blamed? A tramp is prosecuted for stealing a shirt from Marks & Spencer; George Soros degrades sterling and goes free. The wonder to Jomier is not that there is so much theft but that there is so little. Why is the underclass so docile? Why do those living in the tenements of White City put up with the conspicuous consumption of the rich in Kensington or Belgravia? Why is there not a constant, endemic, freelance expropriation of the expropriators? Why do not the wretches on unemployment benefit or the minimum wage, who will never prosper in the society in which they live, set fire to the bankers’ mansions, storm the private gardens of Ladbroke Square, throw bricks through the windows of Lidgate’s and Maison Blanc, and torch the Range Rovers and S-Class Mercedes? Where are the Bakunins or the Proudhons crying ‘All property is theft!’?