My own debanking story concerns a card rather than a bank account. Not the same degree of inconvenience as Nigel Farage, but a similarly telling insight into modern administrative culture. I feel awkward writing this, because in the 30 years I have used American Express, including an enjoyable decade when I also worked for the brand as a copywriter, few companies have impressed me more. They are unfailingly courteous and responsive. On many occasions, such as when arriving at an airport to discover I had to pay £4,000 for an unratified airline ticket, my card has been invaluable; I willingly follow their advice not to leave home without it.

But one evening last year Amex didn’t do nicely. There’s a special feeling to having a Platinum card declined. In Monaco or Palm Beach it might be fashionably raffish; this was at McDonald’s in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Some months earlier, to comply with ‘anti-terrorism and money-laundering legislation’, they’d asked me for photographs of the passports of all cardholders on my account. I’d dutifully uploaded this information for my wife and daughters but not for my father, who is in his nineties, does not have a passport, lives 160 miles away and has no known ties to al Qaeda or the ’Ndrangheta. I naively assumed that since it is uncommon for a criminal organisation to confine its financial activities to fortnightly visits to M&S Simply Foods, this wouldn’t matter. I was wrong. I then missed the single email I was sent informing me of their intention to cancel all cards on my account for ever.

The person on the phone clearly thought the decision was nuts but was powerless to act. It was like a posher version of the phone call in Goodfellas: ‘This is Vinny. We had a problem. And we couldn’t do nuttin’ about it.’ I was an unmade man.

‘What has happened is your compliance department is running your business,’ I said. ‘If it’s worth sending 20 letters by post to gain a customer, it’s worth sending two letters by post to avoid losing a customer.’ A month later my card was quietly reinstated.

Why would a normally sane company do something so peremptorily stupid? Well, it’s called Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy and it applies everywhere. Pournelle’s Law states that ‘in any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence or are eliminated entirely’. Bureaucracies hence grow in a way analogous to cancers, which occur whenever the reproductive interests of a tumour contrive to diverge from the interests of the organism sustaining it.

We often see this as just a public sector problem. Trust me, it isn’t. Any administrative function allowed to ride roughshod over the people delivering value to the citizen, customer, patient or student is at permanent risk of growing uncontrollably or else metastasizing into something harmful. No one actually serving Coutts’s customers would have time to write a 40-page dossier on Nigel Farage – they’d be too busy working. But Farage’s bank manager would have no sway over the decision of the commissariat. Where will this end?

Such departments should receive more scrutiny than the people who perform the core functions of a business. Instead they evade scrutiny by the cunning act of setting themselves up as arbiters over the people who do the actual work. You must endlessly justify your productivity to the finance department, but how productive is your finance department? Nobody knows. And where did all these jobs come from suddenly? If there is one economic statistic that terrifies me, it is the appallingly low rate of middle-class unemployment.