A veritable army of grave-looking gentlemen in grey suits fetched up at the Royal Festival Hall last week for Russell-Cooke’s solemn event ‘Enforcing Regulatory Standards in a Liberalised Market’. Appropriately, the profession’s über-regulator, Legal Services Board chair David Edmonds CBE, topped the bill.

The overweening gravitas was punctured, if only momentarily. Just as the event was starting, an excitable PA announcer shrilled that Sacha Baron Cohen was at that moment striding along a red carpet at the front of the building in full ‘Dictator’ get-up. He was there to attend the premiere of the eponymous film.

‘The dictator’s here,’ someone whispered. To which one lawyer wag responded: ‘Yes, and Sacha Baron Cohen is in the building, too.’