Why is the UK not sanctioning more oligarchs? Well, it’s hard for the Tories to fight their instincts

The Conservatives are slow to act because they cannot fight against their own muscle memory, their own instincts, and to a great extent, their own donors

If you’re struggling to understand why it is that the UK is taking so very long to impose any kind of meaningful sanctions on London’s oligarchs you have to realise that these matters are fiendishly complicated. It’s not simply the case that, actually, they don’t really want to. Nor is it the case that, actually, they can’t, even if they did. It’s both.

If you’re wondering why it is that France can just seize a super yacht that belongs to Vladimir Putin’s de facto deputy, Igor Sechin, while the UK makes vague commitments to maybe do this kind of thing in 18 months or so, you might find the answer just by staring out the window.

By staring, that is, at the grey spring sky and the driving rain and wondering just what it is that makes this dreary windswept island the go-to destination for the world’s super rich.

They’re here because we want them to be here. We have welcomed them, and their money, in ways that France, Germany, the US, and everywhere else in between would simply never do, by offering them tax arrangements that are an affront to the basic dignity of every British mug that actually works for a living.

British governments have either turned a blind eye or actively assisted in the creation of a subterranean Everest of money. And now, almost overnight, the public expects its conquerors and their obscene little professional class of lawyer and accountant sherpas to be chased off it and the whole thing blown up. But the trouble is, the government doesn’t know its way around the mountain like they do.

In 2011, I spent every day for four months covering the jaw dropping £6bn court case between Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky. At the heart of the case was some shares in some Russian commodities companies that the former president, Boris Yeltsin, allowed Berezovsky to purchase for about $100m (£75m), in return for support from Berezovsky’s TV station in the 1996 presidential election.

The support was given, the election won. Thatcher’s former PR man, Lord Tim Bell, founder of PR firm Bell Pottinger, ran the campaign without emerging from the Moscow hotel where no one knew he was. Later on, these cut price assets were sold back to the Russian state for more than £6bn. But by this point, Berezovsky had fallen out with Putin, so the money went to his protege, Roman Abramovich, and is the source of his fortune.

Berezovsky coming to London to sue Abramovich for this cash was a glorious pay day for all involved. To take but one example, Lord Sumption delayed his elevation to the Supreme Court so he could take the Abramovich case, for which he was paid more than £8m.

In the excellent novel Snow Drops, by former Economist Moscow correspondent AD Miller (the title, “snow drop”, is the word used for the bodies of homeless Russians who’ve been duped into carrying out contract killings before being murdered themselves, which appear by the roadside when the snow thaws in spring), the main character, a Moscow lawyer, refers to himself as “a fly on the cossack’s arse”.

The city of London is a blizzard of flies, feasting upon the rolling hills of puckered cossack’s arses. At the time of the Berezovsky/Abramovich case, it was regularly pointed out that it was “a good thing” that entirely foreign corporate fights were settled in London. A trusted and respected legal system is a valuable export, just like tourism.

It is entirely legitimate to ask, at this point, what would even be achieved by seizing the assets of London’s oligarchs. There is plenty of sane analysis around that suggests that pursuing oligarchs could even have an adverse effect, in terms of pressuring Putin to end the war.

All that has happened, in the last few days, is that the question of whether the UK wants to carry on being the super-elite’s tax free playground has been brought into sharper focus.

Naturally, most people don’t want it to be so, but a very large number of those people also have an unerring tendency to vote for the Conservatives. (A now accepted wisdom of the current crisis is how fortunate we are that Nato-hating Jeremy Corbyn is not in charge. It is correct, but even his fiercest critics, of which I am one, would struggle to deny that he’d have started seizing assets without so much as blinking.)

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Do we, for example, want to finally end such outrages as “non-dom” tax status, for a start? The notion that if you can convince HMRC – and they don’t take much convincing – that this isn’t, you know, your real home, you don’t really have to pay any tax here.

Zac Goldsmith used to be a non-dom but gave up the status under persuasion from David Cameron. That no one in politics can be a non-dom, because it is an arrangement so obscene that it cannot possibly bear public scrutiny, tells you everything you need to know about it. And yet it continues to exist.

The Conservatives are slow to act because they cannot fight against their own muscle memory, their own instincts, and to a great extent, their own donors. They don’t actually want it to change. But for the moment, it does seem like they will struggle to style out doing nothing.