Open House?

"They won't last one winter in England," said Arthur Creech Jones, Clement Attlee's Secretary of State for the Colonies, while the Empire Windrush was at sea. Most of them did, of course. But Ellen DeGeneres and her wife have not, having been part of a trend of American liberal moneybags either fleeing to Britain or planning to do so. Why not to Canada, its urban hubs climatically no worse than Britain to a Californian, and no distance to travel, certainly not as Americans measured these things, from many of the other liberal strongholds?

But anyway, a special visa route for them, akin to those for Hongkongers, for Ukrainians, and for some Afghans, has been proposed by the third largest party in the House of Commons, which is still in with a good chance of being the Official Opposition in the next Parliament. The Liberal Democrats' new rival for that accolade, the Green Party, would be unlikely to disagree with such a scheme. But treat them like any other asylum seekers, say I. On £9:95 per week and banned from working, put up the likes of Mrs and Mrs DeGeneres at the Army training camp on the outskirts of Crowborough.

If you are the type that regrets the prevalence of the Windrush generation's great-grandchildren, by no means all of them of entirely Afro-Caribbean lineage, then console yourself that these days, the likelihood that a liberal American moneybags might have great-grandchildren was effectively nil, and they regarded that as a thoroughly good thing. Indeed, it is a great consolation to us all.