Sneak, snitch, grass – those one syllable words do not convey an aura of approval. In school, where we imbibe the morality that plagues us for the rest of our lives, a telltale can expect a bigger punishment than the class-mate he is squealing on. The sheer number of synonyms (I have just used five) shows how frowned-upon the practice is.

Governments – rarely the symbols of propriety we would like them to be – have a long history of encouraging informants. I have always been haunted by W. F. Yeames’s portrait of a boy being questioned as to the whereabouts of his father during the English Civil War. And then there were all those ‘Wanted $$$$$$’ posters plastered across the Wild West, not to mention the bank whistle-blower payouts over the last few years.

But the Greeks (who else?) have now raised the rat stakes a notch. Desperate to placate the Troika (now for some reason referred to – in deference to the Greeks – as the ‘European Commission,  ECB and  IMF’), the new Government has proposed employing tourists as tax spies.

The idea is that tourists will be asked, in return for  an hourly fee, to be wired up to audio or video equipment that will provide evidence of cash transactions between themselves and their Greek hosts.

I am afraid that I cannot get my head around this particular kind of international espionage.  I am a fan of spy novels – I have read almost the entire product of John Le Carre’s fecund imagination – but there is an underlying assumption that a spook is: (a) operating for his own government against a foreign government (a patriot); or (b) for a foreign government against his own government (a traitor); or (c) for his own government against a foreign government while making the foreign government think he is working for them against his own government –  and vice versa (double agent); or (d) for his own government against his own government (a shtinker). The CIA/MI6 exams do not have an ‘(e) none-of-the-above’ option, even when allowing for the widest possible definition of the word ‘government’ – but that is precisely what the lunatic Greeks are proposing.

The idea is both obscene (that word has plenty of life beyond porn) and insane. Greece has long passed into the realm of obscenity, but insanity should still worry them. Do they not realise that, by recruiting tourists who are coming to Greece for a good time, they risk destroying the whole underbelly of the Greek tourist industry – its goodwill? What is more, visitors from countries where the National Tax Authority is a feared institution, similar to a man-eating shark, are not likely to want to play with the Greek version, even if continues to prove it has no teeth.

Sorry, Mr Alexis Tsipras, you are going to have to do better than that if you don’t want the Troika to tread hard on your oxygen tube. This is one potential tourist who will now definitely not being coming to Athens this year. I think I will go to Russia instead – at least there they do things the right way round,  and will probably be spying on me.