Of all human instincts, not even the urge to say “I told you so” is stronger than the response called tu quoque: “Look who’s talking.” To judge from children, it is innate (“Cathy says you took her chocolate,” “Yes but she stole my doll”), and we don’t grow out of it, to judge by politicians in one country or another who are positively addicted to the tu quoque.

There has just been a real collector’s item. France has led calls for pressure to be put on the Burmese junta at the Security Council and through the EU, where foreign ministers discussed the issue on Oct. 15. As part of the push it has tried to enlist a recalcitrant Russia which, conscious perhaps of Chechnya, has no great wish to be seen criticising anyone else’s internal affairs. Hence a Russian minister’s response that the next time there were riots in France he would refer the matter to the UN.

This reply was at once childish, irrelevant, and probably very gratifying. Even those who bridled at Nicolas Sarkozy’s conduct during the banlieue riots two years ago — when he said that the rioters were racaille, or rabble, who should be blasted away with high-pressure hoses — can scarcely suppose that comparing this with what’s happening on the streets of Rangoon is like with like, but the “look who’s talking” is unsusceptible to reason.

Then again, the tu quoque biter is sometimes bit, and the French have their own talent in this regard, as Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, showed. When the Americans were yet again instructing the EU to admit Turkey, Chirac said this was no more Bush’s business than it would be his to tell Bush how to deal with Mexico. In a way it wasn’t a bad point, but it didn’t really address the pros and cons of Turkish admission.

All this has a very long history. The 19th century British Prime Minister William Gladstone was the most high-minded, and sometimes self-righteous, of Victorian statesmen, and liked to lecture foreign rulers such as Prince Schwarzenberg about Austrian misrule of subject peoples. Schwarzenberg was quick-witted enough to make the obvious retort: Ireland. The British were always vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy when they proclaimed the merits of parliamentary democracy while expanding their empire, until the Americans took over the role.

In Soviet Russia tu quoque was so much a part of official rhetoric that it was turned into one of the classic jokes associated with the (in every sense) legendary Radio Armenia station. A caller-in asks the programme’s political expert “What is the average wage of an industrial worker in the US?” After a very long pause the answer comes: “They kill negroes.”

But nowhere is the tu quoque so popular as in the endless, exhausting debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When I reluctantly took part as a witness in the BBC radio’s The Moral Maze (a programme that has always irritated me, from its name on), Michael Gove, the bumptious columnist turned Conservative MP, thought he was ambushing me by asking: “Tell me, why is Israel so much more criticised for what it does in Gaza than China for what it does in Tibet?” I muttered something about how the answer would take long, but two wrongs don’t make a right. And yet, though we’re meant to be taught that early on, the inner child will always want to retort: “Look who’s talking!” — The Guardian