While accepting that David Lammy, the deputy prime minister and justice secretary is, for many, the human embodiment of Marmite – loved or hated, with not much in between – one can still question whether, for all his faults, he should “go home to the Caribbean”. Whether you agree with him over this or that utterance or the broad sweep of government policy, he has, unquestionably made his contribution to Tottenham, in north London, whose people he has represented for a quarter of a century, to parliament, as a senior MP, as foreign secretary and now as an important figure with several key portfolios.

So when a lieutenant of Nigel Farage, admittedly no fan of Lammy’s, suggests, without notable contradiction or condemnation from Reform, that Lammy “should go home to the Caribbean”, one is tempted to look at that askance. But then, in the year just past, when bigotry in frontline politics took off its training wheels and othering became the sport that everyone can play, the notion that someone who clearly belongs here should not belong here ceased to shock.

Bad stuff happened in 2025. The big stuff you know: the violent, toxically nativist besieging of asylum seeker hotels and the condoning of it by rightwing politicians and media outlets. The deployment up and down the country by hard-right activists of the British and St George’s flag, as a symbol, not of collective adhesion (as it surely can be) but of intimidation. The very public claims that Farage, a man with pretensions to lead our country, hurt........

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