You know when you’re a kid and your parents finally get on your wick so much that you think, ‘that’s it – I’m gonna run away’? At the age of 15, I actually got to London, selling scent in a chemist in King’s Cross Station for six weeks – but most children only get to the end of the road before slinking back after a few hours. To add insult to injury their families don’t even realise they are gone.

When I think of this clownery, I’m reminded of the celebrities who stay in England and bang on about Ireland, or buy a holiday home there. It’s the equivalent of running away to the end of the road for celebs who want to seem a bit special. Like a luxury belief, it’s a luxury passport. I call them the Lie-rish, as the foundation on which their ‘belief’ is built is so false.

We’re all aware of those hilariously sulky Remoaners who started fussing about having an Irish grandparent when they lost the Brexit referendum – and now the famous are doing it too

We’re all aware of those hilariously sulky Remoaners who started fussing about having an Irish grandparent when they lost the Brexit referendum – the poor little oofums – and now the famous are doing it too. Take Steve Coogan, who somewhere along the line turned from a sparky bloke you’d like to hang out with to a left-wing Alan Partridge, apparently utterly unaware of how pompous his pronouncements sound. Like this one: ‘I’ve always felt that I have slight antipathy towards the British flag I’ve been raised with. It’s not like a contempt for it – it’s just holding the Establishment at arm’s length because of history.’ Hmmm – would that be the bit of history that saw us stand alone against the Nazi war machine while the Emerald Isle was conveniently ‘neutral’, one wonders? Coogan then intoned, ‘I am a........

© The Spectator