Panama Papers gave us a gander at all sorts of investments

Taxing work: we learned last week that London mayor Boris Johnson is paid £266,667 for his Telegraph colums Photograph: Tim Ireland/AP

The most chat-worthy fact so far in this spasm of tax-return turmoil was Boris Johnson’s fee for his weekly Daily Telegraph column (the one where Boris often does his PG Wodehouse-goes-to-Brussels schtick). It’s £266,667 a year – and Johnson, in fourth estate mode, once called it “chicken feed”. Which hints where this whole debate my wander next.

David Cameron took care to include a couple of newspapers – the Mirror and Guardian – in his catalogue of offshore investors. He could, if he’d wished, have gone on for an hour, flitting from Box 46, Sir Walter Raleigh House in St Helier – where Mr Richard Desmond’s Northern and Shell (Jersey) does its business – to Ferne Park, Wiltshire – where the Viscount Rothermere of the Mail sits with a catalogue of Jersey and Bermuda trusts at his elbow.

Cameron could have pottered fruitfully on – to the Telegraph’s Barclays (calling the Monaco office from their Channel Islands home). He might even have dared to explore the global labyrinth of Rupert Murdoch’s finances, before reading choice extracts from the Commons public affairs committee’s report on the 1,500 BBC service contracts that, until recently, provided juicy corporation tax savings. Goose for the interviewers as well as for those who want to take a gander?

But somehow, you feel, a more mature calm may soon descend on the media’s fevered brows. The big problem raised by Panama’s paper chase was how you create a world tax order when Russia, China and Saudi Arabia – to name but three – play by different rules (and US avoidance barely featured because Delaware did the job at home anyway). Maybe Boris could solve that for us in one of his chicken-feed, £5-a-word columns.