Look, I can argue in favour of Tracey Emin until the cows come home. I like modern art. I think if men have got away with spending 500 years painting each other on horses, then the least ladies should be allowed is some boozy foxine and her Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With tent. Tracey Emin is a cool accessory for any modern country. She’s got ideas! She’s got purpose! She’s got a cracking rack! Plus, it is clear that, if we went out for cocktails together, we would probably have invented the Beatles by 9pm; and lost our shoes by midnight!

Sadly, however, last week Tracey said something that threw our close, decades long, totally imaginary friendship into doubt. “I am simply not willing to pay tax at 50 per cent,” she said. “I reckon it would mean me paying about 65p in every pound with tax, National Insurance and so on.” She then went on to threaten to leave Britain and relocate to France — where she has a home — when the new 50 per cent tax, on earnings of £150,000 and over, is introduced in April next year.

Obviously Emin is not the first public figure to get lemon over tax increases. Michael Caine has said he’s also thinking of leaving. Guy Hands, the City financier behind EMI Records, has moved to Guernsey. George Harrison, of course, wrote a whole song: Taxman. Although 43 years have since passed, it does still seem amazing that Harrison’s first big songwriting moment — released when the man was being treated as a demigod, drowning in a sea of beautiful women and getting high with Bob Dylan — was spaffing on about his accounts. Fair enough, 95 per cent tax is steep — but were a young man ever in a position to lie back, sigh and say, “All things considered, I’m still winning, really. Indeed, to coin a phrase, everything must pass”, it was Harrison.

So yes, moaning about tax is well established as a British celebrity pastime. It’s up there with golf and Botox. But frankly, I just don’t understand. Personally, I love paying tax. Really. Maybe it’s my upbringing — I am the first Moran ever to pay tax. Well, a “money tax”, rather than a “potato and mud tithe” tax. When I got my first implicitly threatening, standard letter from the Inland Revenue, I was thrilled. That means that you’re earning money! You’re not going to go to the workhouse after all! Should you consider the population of the world for a second, you will observe that a British citizen, earning enough to pay tax, is in the top echelon of success. Yes, the paperwork is a downside — but not-being-an-indentured-child-labourer-in-China-making-lightbulbs is a plus.

So given that only 0.6 per cent of British workers earn £150,000 or more, complaining about having to pay what is effectively a You Really Are Winning tax comes across as caviar-maddened ingratitude. I think it’s actually a repressed, British form of showing off — like when the aristrocracy complain about how draughty their castles are, and how difficult it is to find an undermaid who will tolerate being molested and sent away to a home for unmarried mothers.

This is not the way I roll. Every time I write out a gigantic cheque to the Inland Revenue, I get a bit excited. Woooo! I go. What a seriously grown-up thing to be doing! It’s like drinking whisky, buying an engagement ring or chopping down a tree. In a world where nearly other signifier of adulthood — fighting Vikings, dying during childbirth, growing a beard, nurturing your own yeast-culture, having a leg ripped off in an horrific agricultural accident — has been replaced with an unending childhood of telly, jogging bottoms and strawberry-flavoured medicine, writing a bracingly large cheque is pretty much the only adult duty we have left. On this basis alone, I find it exhilarating. I kind of want it to hurt a bit. I feel like The Joker facing down Batman: “Come on — stick National Insurance on top of it! I can handle it! VAT me! VAT ME!”

But I am not wholly unsympathetic to the point that Tracey Emin is making. We have, after all, been best imaginary friends for a long time now — so when she says, “So much here is simply not working. We’re paying through the nose for everything”, I kind of know where she’s coming from. You give the Government a cheque that could buy a really nice three-bedroom caravan — and then, the next day, the bin next to the bus stop is overflowing. It’s hard not to draw your own conclusions.

But you know what would, in a single stroke, make tax-paying much more popular in this country? And might even keep my incredibly close friend Tracey here?

A receipt. After all, whenever I’ve just blown £227 in Waitrose and feel a bit alarmed by it, it’s oddly comforting to read through the receipt and say to myself, “but at least I have a lot of yoghurt now”. Similar comfort would be experienced by the taxpayer if, in exchange for a large cheque, one was simply issued with a print-out of what you’d just bought yourself: £2,000 for the NHS, £600 for streetlights, £2 for Prince Andrew, etc.

And of course, once you’ve got a receipt, it’s much easier to claim a refund . . .

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