I claim no particular gift of prophecy, but it’s almost exactly a year since I wrote in this column about John, the lovely man who comes to help me with all the jobs I can’t manage in the garden. With more than 1,200 illegal migrants billeted in a former military base in our county and bussed regularly into nearby towns, John was worried about the safety of his teenage daughter. Like a lot of fathers, he despaired of the failure of successive governments to stop the boats.
“We were talking in the pub the other night,” John said to me, “and we decided that, in the end, it’s men like us who will have to go down and defend our southern border.”
