Finally, we have a government prepared to stand up to that under-scrutinised bane of British society: care workers. Our home secretary, James Cleverly, has gleefully announced an order banning overseas care workers from bringing “dependants” to the UK. Some naysayers may question the wisdom here, what with the national shortage of care workers, and with foreign staff in particular subject to gruesome exploitation, with some being paid effectively as little as £5 an hour and charged thousands of pounds in unexpected fees. I hear that, but you can’t put a price on being able to gaze into the eyes of an overworked, underpaid care worker as they tend to your loved one’s needs, knowing vast oceans separate them from their own beloved.

Spite, alas, does not pay the bills, and here lies the fatal flaw in the government’s strategy. Last week, the Sunday Telegraph’s editor penned a grief-stricken piece headlined “For the first time in my life, I’m now beginning to think Britain is finished”. Apologies for sounding unsympathetic about someone clearly in a right old miserable state, but if you are a Conservative convinced your country is quite literally doomed after 14 years of Tory rule, is it not time to ask yourself some searching questions? Blaming our national existential crisis on us having the wrong flavour of Conservative government doesn’t really make sense either, given that shapeshifting is inherent to the Tory DNA: we’ve seen shrink-the-state Thatcherism, “national........

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