Why are PAs behaving so badly these days? If this question makes your blood boil with righteous indignation, then clearly you must have been living in a cave for the last few months because certain members of the PA profession have been (mis)behaving very badly indeed.

Take, for instance, the personal assistant to rock group the Dave Matthews Band, who managed to skim off the not-unsubstantial sum of $400,000 from right under their noses.

A cool $1 million was the amount embezzled by the PA who worked for Nicky Hilton’s ex-husband, financier Todd Meister. Apparently, she took out several credit cards in her boss’s name and enjoyed a high old time travelling round Europe and the Caribbean in first-class luxury.

Then, there was the former assistant to U2 star Adam Clayton, who was convicted of not just a couple of counts of theft from his bank account, but an astounding 181 separate instances dating over more than four years.

And although model Erin O’Connor’s PA was given a suspended sentence when she admitted going AWOL with the former’s credit card to the tune of thousands of pounds, a personal assistant at investment bank Goldman Sachs was not so lucky when her chicanery landed her behind bars. But then it’s hardly surprising, given that this light-fingered lady made off with the frankly astonishing sum of £4.3 million.

While the vast majority of us are law-abiding, upright citizens with no more than a parking fine to our names, I believe the crimes committed by renegade PAs should be dealt with harshly. Not only do they give the rest of us a bad name, but their offences are like those perpetrated by police officers – personal assistants should be held accountable to a higher standard because of the trust employers put in them. And, that, my little chickadees, is not something any of us should take lightly.