Well said. You've got the Wet on the run. Keep it up.

Quite so. If the government had any coherence at all, it centred around catering to its new, Midlands voters. This policy would slap them in the face. Johnson has turned out every bit as detached and dreamy as his detractors have claimed. In this inattentive state he imagines that all matters of civil or principled concern can be drowned in money - hence "levelling up". Of course, he can't even get that right, for instead of investing in local services he squanders money on a futile railway. But what his approach utterly fails to recognise is that Brexit rose up the agenda and triumphed at the polls in the name of working class anxieties over border control. As the referendum demonstrated, beyond contradiction, these anxieties are resistant to economic solutions. That the PM, who exploited these worries to gain his Brexit victory, should now junk them so lightly speaks volumes about his frivolity, his hollowness and his treachery.

Well said, Lord Green. No policy in such flagrant contradiction of a manifesto commitment can do the government which enacts it any good. The comparison is with the Liberals over tuition fees. Moreover, Britain is densely populated, has a housing crisis - not yet solved - a health service which has to be "protected" and increasingly problematic experiences of "community relations". To bring yet more people into a situation like this is to throw petrol on flame. Then again, whilst supporters of the policy have it both ways - "Let them in!" followed by "Don't worry; they won't come" - responsible commentators will know that invitations without limits have a nasty habit of being taken up. If the government wants to draw some advantage from the fall of Hong Kong, its invitation should extend to the few persons whose absence from the former colony would bring its financial value to an end. And that is all.

This doesn't read like a reply to the point I'm making. Were you addressing someone else?

I'm bound to say it does seem an exaggeration to me. If Farage is to be dismissed then surely Pierre Poujade is more the comparison - and if so, where's the harm in letting him have his say? If he "inflames" then it is less through rhetoric than by pointing out inconvenient facts. There is a problem with illegal migration on the south coast. The French navy seems for some reason to be abetting it. The government, which is there to uphold law, after all, is failing to address this concern - and failing at a time of "lockdown". Simply to shut him up seems excessive and - in the current climate - rather sinister. We may dislike a man's tone for all sorts of good reasons; we may disapprove of the construction he puts on events; but it is far better to express this in argument than in the dangerous act of silencing him.

What can one take from it? It's just a dodge.

Well, you have the advantage of me now because the "moderators" have seen fit to exercise their ever more censorious attitude to heresy. Therefore, it seems they have declared you the victor. Why play cricket when the umpire catches the ball? However, I follow Christopher Caldwell and others in believing that the attempt to break the link between ethnicity and culture is a hiding to nothing - or rather to the destruction of the culture in question. Think of any society you like; and then consider its artefacts. Do they not reflect the ethnicity of the peoples who created them? Russian classics concern largely Russian characters. Chinese porcelain depicts mandarins and emperors. Gothic sculpture reflects the European character of the locals and so on. On a popular level, in living memory, France was represented by "Marianne", a brunette with blue eyes; Britain by John Bull - a red head. You say that great culture shoud aspire to the universal, but qualify this by saying it should not be "hegemonic". My dear sir, that is a plain self contradiction. If a culture tries to represent humanity at large it necessarily claims a global purchase and authority. I offer another, better vision - read it quickly, because some unenlightened Winston Smith will probably bin it very fast: it is by being as particular, as vivid, as intense and as exclusive as possible that cultures end up meaning something to all other cultures and to all humanity. They attain universality by their confident completeness, not by widening themselves to the point of incoherence.

Well, you've secured my attention for two minutes. Let's hope this fulfils your libido and shuts you up. Your next reply: (to be screamed in toddler's glee): Three times!!!

True. And Henry VIII for all those who have been "fat-shamed"; Elizabeth the First for "independent women" and FDR for wheelchair users. This could prove a useful tactic.

Will you go away, please? I want nothing further to do with a spiteful, churlish, petty creature such as yourself, which is why I don't bother to comment on your empty remarks.