If Gordon Brown learnt one lesson during his miserable incarceration in 10 Downing Street, you’d think it would be this: that politicians have to take questions about immigration seriously. They can’t ignore them, they can’t dismiss them, and they certainly can’t – as Mr Brown did in 2010 – refer to a pensioner in Rochdale as “a sort of bigoted woman”, just because she’s worried about the number of people arriving from Eastern Europe.

As Mr Brown swiftly discovered, that sort of response does not, on the whole, go down well.

Yet, whatever he learnt from his subsequent humiliation, he’s forgotten it. Or so it seemed, listening to him on the EU referendum campaign trail today.