IN THE WORLD of tax, double entendres are much like SmashMouth years: they start coming and they don’t stop coming. Even tax accountants and treasury economists must groan upon hearing the ding of a Let’s Get Fiscal webinar invite. When the book The Joy of Tax: How a fair tax system can create a better society came out in 2015, Guardian journalist Zoe Williams interviewed its author, chartered-accountant-turned-wonk Richard Murphy: 

‘Tax is, anyway, the second most interesting word ending in x in the English language,’ he tells me, in case I hadn’t got the fact that it sounds a bit like ‘sex’ from the title of the book. This is what it does to a person, when they spend more than a decade trying to persuade the world that tax is actually a fun thing to talk about.