Millionaire celebrities love nothing better than a ‘Cause’ which makes them look good.

They hope it might allay suspicion that they are, in fact, rather selfish and egocentric people who have dedicated their lives to the single-minded pursuit of fame and fortune.

Once upon a time, the favoured Cause was symbolised by ostentatiously wearing an Aids ribbon. Remember those?

Millionaire celebrities love nothing better than a ‘Cause’ which makes them look good. Pictured are George and Amal Clooney at the United Nations

Then it was Climate Change: Leonardo DiCaprio descending from on high in his private gas-guzzling jet to explain why everybody else should be doing something about it.

The latest Cause that appeals to this unlovely class of people is Refugees.

The great thing about such Causes is that they allow you to posture and pose as morally superior to the common herd without having to make the personal self-sacrifices that traditional religions demand.

You don’t have to fast for the month of Ramadan or the season of Lent, you don’t have to practise celibacy or humility or self-denial — quite the opposite, in fact.

You don’t even have to go on arduous pilgrimages. And you certainly don’t have to follow one of Jesus’s fiercest instructions, when he told the rich man who wanted to be saved that he should give all his money to the poor.

Speaking on Channel 4 News this week, Mrs Clooney criticised Britain for having taken in only carefully restricted numbers of refugees from Syria and Iraq

Instead, you can just fly around the world spouting hot air about how people are suffering, about how deeply you care, and how other people ought to care as well.

Selfie

The latest such dubious poseuse is celebrity lawyer Amal Clooney, wife of the famous George. She has been addressing the UN, with George in tow. Indeed, George was pictured holding her hand as she spoke.

When they stepped outside for the inevitable selfie pictures with fans, though, plenty wanted pictures of themselves with Amal — not George.

Speaking on Channel 4 News this week, Mrs Clooney criticised Britain for having taken in only carefully restricted numbers of refugees from Syria and Iraq.

In contrast, she specifically praised Germany, under Angela Merkel’s ‘open-door policy’, for having received a staggering one million refugees and immigrants in a single year.

Yet Mrs Merkel’s ill-considered knee-jerk policy, against the clear wishes of the German people, has led to immediate and alarming consequences.

Among many other incidents, there have been horrendous reports of sex attacks committed by migrants.

The biggest event in Britain this week concerning refugees was the hijacking of Parliament Square for a demonstration about the plight of migrants crossing the Mediterranean and the Aegean sea.

Hundreds of lifejackets were laid out on the grass in the shadow of Winston Churchill’s statue.

The protest was organised by David Miliband’s aid charity International Rescue, but inevitably there were Left-wing celebrities, such as the actress Juliet Stevenson, in attendance to help publicise the stunt.

It goes without saying the refugee crisis is complicated. There are no easy solutions. At least, this much is obvious to the common-sense man in the street.

Caution is needed. Humanitarian aid where possible, for sure. Refugee camps for Syrian asylum seekers in the nearest safe country, according to international rules.

In contrast, she specifically praised Germany, under Angela Merkel’s ‘open-door policy’, for having received a staggering one million refugees and immigrants in a single year

But never mind such complications. They don’t impinge upon the permanent floating champagne-bubble of luvvie-land, where you get to walk all those red carpets, receive enormous pay cheques and fly first class or even private.

Problems

If you’re Amal Clooney, you might be flying between your various, luxuriously appointed homes. Your villa on Lake Como — oh sorry, two villas. (Perhaps she and George like to have separate bathrooms). Your mansion in Berkshire. Your beachside place in Mexico. And, of course, the pad in Los Angeles.

Although George and Amal have repeatedly talked about the need for the West to take in more refugees, it is not known yet just how many Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans or Eritreans they have personally welcomed into any of their lovely houses.

The greatest blessing of all in being a celeb, it seems, is that suddenly you are knowledgeable about everything, or at least you think you are. The most intractable international problems — which have baffled the greatest statesmen — become magically clear to you.

For Mrs Clooney, this means that the West should take in apparently unlimited numbers of refugees and asylum seekers, and then the terrible problems of Syria will be solved.

She also has great faith that the UN can and should sort out that murderous bedlam, if only she demands it firmly enough. Why do our celebrity luvvies continue to have such faith in the UN? Perhaps because like them, it’s international, unaccountable, very generously funded and a little bit useless.

Amal Clooney is far from being the only culprit. Plenty of others, with zero obvious expertise in the area, have presumed to lecture us on how we must accept more refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, even jihadis — without ever troubling to explain how these very different groups might be distinguished.

Smug

In the past year alone, we have heard from Benedict Cumberbatch, Helena Bonham Carter, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, J.K. Rowling, Bob Geldof . . . the list goes on.

If you’re Amal Clooney, you might be flying between your various, luxuriously appointed homes

Actually, it’s probably just easier to say ‘all of them’. The whole ghastly, smug, cosseted, self-adoring crew.

Referring to the Syrian crisis while he was on stage in London after a performance, Sherlock star Cumberbatch announced that we

should ‘f*** the politicians’. J.K. Rowling went online to ‘retweet’ the comments of others, calling [former] British Prime Minister David Cameron’s stance on refugees ‘utterly shameful’. She also linked her comments to a petition for the UK to accept more asylum seekers.

She wrote: ‘If you can’t imagine yourself in one of those boats, you have something missing. They are dying for a life worth living.’

Meanwhile, a gang of stars, including Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett and Keira Knightley collaborated to produce a video this month to highlight the plight of refugees.

And then there’s another Academy Award winner, Emma Thompson, who can always be relied on to say something eye-wateringly right-on.

She gave a controversial interview last year saying Britain had failed to take in thousands of refugees from Calais because of ‘racism’. She told the programme the UK’s response to the refugee crisis in Europe was ‘really shaming’.

Last Saturday, had you been in London, you might have found yourself caught up in a pro-refugee march among whose ranks were the firebrand actress Vanessa Redgrave and, once again, Juliet Stevenson.

All this stuff is the luvvies’ religion, remember, and heretics in their ranks would have a pretty hard time.

Private

Any celebrity who thought our current policies on admitting refugees — we have promised to take in 20,000 from Syria, and have donated more money to the refugee camps in the Middle East than any country except America — were reasonable would have their membership of luvviedom revoked.

But then our continent-hopping stars have no interest in how the man or woman in the street may feel. They are uninterested in poll after poll which shows that opposition to immigration remains high across Europe. (A YouGov poll last month found that 70 per cent of British people think there has been too much immigration over the past decade.)

The greatest blessing of all in being a celeb, it seems, is that suddenly you are knowledgeable about everything, or at least you think you are

But celebs don’t have to worry about the legitimate and well-informed concerns of ordinary people. They don’t worry about losing their jobs to a new arrival. They don’t find the waiting lists at their local GP growing ever longer. They don’t find their children are in a class where English is a minority language.

Their jets are private, their doctors are private, their children’s schools are private. Their entire lives are private, as exclusively set apart and jealously guarded from the real world as the Clooneys’ Italian villas.

Fine, if that’s the way they want it. But it does mean that they are spectacularly unqualified when it comes to understanding the problems the real world has to deal with, day in, day out.