If Ukip aren’t racist, how come so many racists seem to like them?

The most thought-provoking discussion about racism I ever heard took place five years ago on Channel 4’s Celebrity Wife Swap. No, it did. On the one side they had the former TV pundit and football manager Ron Atkinson and his wife Maggie, and on the other they had the former Olympic javelin thrower Tessa Sanderson and her husband Densign. Maggie Atkinson was the star. ‘Ron’s not a racist,’ she kept saying, with all the sincerity in the world. ‘He’s not. He’s just not.’

That’s all. Possibly I oversold it. The point was, this was about five years after Ron’s TV work had pretty much dried up, due to the way he had called Chelsea’s Marcel Desailly a ‘lazy nigger’ live on air. And what I wondered at the time, and have been wondering ever since, is how, in her mind, she could  square ‘Ron’s not a racist’ with that phrase. Because it’s some trick, that.