What a long way, in politics, a few foreigners will get you. Last week in Bournemouth, the day after Gordon Brown’s big speech, I stopped off in a newsagent. The local paper carried a big front-page headline – something like MIGRANT DANGER – which topped a story about bad Eastern European drivers killing everybody. The young woman at the counter, with her high cheekbones and soft accent, was obviously a migrant from somewhere Slavic, but she somehow managed to sell me a magazine and a flapjack without either of us suffering.
It was a minor irony, of course. I am sure that she wouldn’t have felt targeted by the article, any more than she might have been by Julie Spence, the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire,