David Lammy’s Israel hypocrisy

I suppose we should name it the ‘Lammy Doctrine’, after the Titan of global diplomacy we are so privileged to have as our Foreign Secretary. So many and varied are David Lammy’s achievements that it is difficult to keep up, but this weekend he added yet another to the list.

Responding to the decision of the Israeli immigration authorities to bar two Labour MPs from entry, he appeared to announce a new doctrine: that British MPs are allowed to go where they want, say what they like and behave as they wish, and no country on earth has the right to bar them from entering. And yet Britain can nonetheless bar whoever we want from wherever we want, whenever we want.

He didn’t put it quite like that, of course; Mr Lammy is obviously far too sophisticated to put it so bluntly. But as British citizens we should surely all be grateful for his reinterpretation of ‘Civis Britannicus sum’, the maxim of his nineteenth century predecessor Lord Palmerston.