Often, when there is a great public to-do about some scandal, it is a bit of a fuss about nothing. With the “Windrush generation” story, I feel it is actually worse than people have been saying. It calls into question the thing we talk about so much nowadays: “British values”.

To see this, it is important to understand that the Windrush generation have always been British citizens. It was, I think, a mistake of the Attlee government to grant British citizenship to colonial peoples, but it happened. It was on that basis that they boarded the Windrush, and subsequent boats, and came here.

No one told them they must have papers. Decades later, as immigration law changed, many of them found themselves being harassed by Home Office officials to prove their birthright. If they could not, they were told, they would have to go back “home”. Yet their home, by law, and probably, in most cases, by sentiment, was Britain.