This is not the column that I was planning to write this week. I was going to ask why UK politicians don’t better defend the City’s interests in Brussels. But, after the events of last week in which the Financial Services Authority and other regulators fined Barclays for seeking to manipulate the London interbank offered rate, it’s tempting to answer the question with another query: why should they?

Sure, the financial services industry is one of the key employers in the UK, one of the few industries in which this country is truly world class, an enormous contributor to the Exchequer's coffers, blah, blah, blah.