Over at Business and Politics I brood on the dismal sniggering by UK business people when the Prime Minister informed them that he had summoned the UK’s Ambassadors back to London – and made them all fly economy class.

Inappropriate. If you publicly sneer at your own team, won’t everyone else do the same?

More important, it’s counter-productive in the Prime Minister’s own terms. He says wants the UK’s Ambassadors to support British business. How does he think that in fact they can do just that?

Why does this sort of thing make me, a libertarian-minded conservative, feel queasy?

Partly it’s the hint of the faux-egalitarian blokeiness which characterises our tragic age, a sense that high-end behaviour and practices are less worthy than the lowest common denominator ‘solidarity’ of everyone having a pint in the pub.

That, you recall, was something New Labour cultivated ad and indeed ultra nauseam. In January this year it got David Miliband into trouble in India, when he annoyed the Indian Foreign Minister by calling him by his first name, a move at once naively patronising and culturally insensitive. So much for all those FCO diversity targets.

Whereas the media have focused yet again on the lame issue of Ambassadorial residences overseas, no-one has mentioned the sniggering feebleness of the business people whom the PM addressed.

According to the Indy they laughed when Mr Cameron said that all the Ambassadors had been ‘made to travel economy class’ to join the London meeting. Huh?

Why did no-one have the guts to call out something like this:

“Excuse me, Prime Minister, but we are hoping to win a huge contract in Nigeria. You got it 100% wrong.

 Having our Ambassador in Tokyo sweating in economy class rather than talking for hours to the Nigerian Finance Minister who was in Club on the same flight sends the Nigerians all the wrong signals as to how his views are valued in London.

And, much worse, it misses a terrific chance to lobby quietly for this deal and many others on that long and boring flight!”

Shame on you, business-people. You deserve what you’ll get.