Some years ago I heard a moving story about Roy Jenkins. An unpromising start to any anecdote but stay with me. It involved a croquet match during the late period of his life – as Chancellor of the University of Oxford – when Jenkins had become one of the grander, not to say more pompous, figures in our public life. According to someone playing with him, his Lordship had appalling luck. Although he wielded his mallet with all requisite skill, his ball would not go through the hoops. Eventually the grand old man stormed off the pitch in a great huff. Only after he had left did the other players discover that the ball Lord Jenkins had been working was from a different croquet set, and too big to fit through the hoops.

I have been thinking of the incident of Lord Jenkins and the crooked croquet match lately. Not just because I enjoy the image of his Lordship puffing off the pitch in a fury, but because it feels like something similar is going on at a national level. Someone has queered the game, forbidding us from winning even on home turf.

It seems that absolutely anyone can turn up in Britain and tell us what is or is not British

It seems that absolutely anyone can turn up in Britain and tell us what is or is not British

Our much overpraised Home Secretary used her party conference speech to condemn the ‘racists’ who marched in the south of England the other week with their faces covered. She had nothing to say about the far larger number of people from her own Muslim community who have marched........

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