Green’s pleasant land

So, off to meet Sir Andrew Green, retired Foreign Office mandarin, now founder and chairman of Migration Watch, which is either an ‘independent think tank which has no links to any political party’ (Migrationwatch.co.uk) or is a ‘nasty little outfit with a distinctly unpleasant agenda’ (the Independent). It depends, I suppose, on where you are coming from. Whatever, Sir Andrew lives in Deddington, an extremely pretty village on the edge of the Cotswolds, in a lovely house of delicious honey-coloured ironstone dating back to the mid-18th century. Through the gate and up the front path, which bisects a just-as-lovely garden, filled with snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils, hellebores, rose beds and the first brave geranium leaves pushing through the frost. It’s all so gloriously English. There is even a St George flag, with ‘Proud To Be English’ marker-penned across it, pinned to some scaffolding on the house opposite. ‘Would you care for a wash?’ Sir Andrew asks, when he answers the door, just as a proper Englishman, perhaps, should always ask a lady after a tiring journey. I think, now, that if I’d worn Laura Ashley, say, teamed with a bodice, we might have got on rather better. At least I didn’t fart. His hobbies in Who’s Who are listed as ‘tennis, sailing, bridge and desert travel’.

Sir Andrew, who founded Migration Watch in 2001, is now 63. He is dapper, handsome, articulate, the acceptable face of something, although I’m not yet sure what. Into the living-room: bookcases, dainty china thingies, photographs of his two children and pretty inks of Devon and Cornish coastlines. The son of an RAF group captain and a diplomat all his life, he was latterly ambassador to Syria and then Saudi Arabia, but there appear to be few, if any, Middle-Eastern flavours here. He offers tea, which I accept, then his conditions, which appear non-negotiable.