When I first heard the government was trying to deport Windrush generation immigrants who had lived almost their whole lives in Britain, I was so cross I almost tripped over my own anger.

“What sort of a country is this?” I ranted to the radio. “Have I fallen asleep and woken up in Trump’s America?”

But no, it wasn’t the Donald nightmare but the other one – the one when you wake up to find that you are living in Theresa May’s Britain. Not a place you’d want to visit if you didn’t already live here.

This disgraceful story has been brewing for a while now, thanks to relentless reporting by the Guardian and the efforts of MPs from all parties.

Earlier today, this scandal reached Parliament, where home secretary Amber Rudd announced the creation of a new team dedicated to ensuring no Windrush-era citizens would be shown the door after being classified as illegal immigrants.

During the debate, Rudd said the Home Office had become “too concerned with policy and strategy” over individuals – an observation which is both true and a remarkable bit of chutzpah.

Had she forgotten her job title for a moment? Turning against her department/herself, she said: “This is about individuals. We have seen the individual stories and some of them have been terrible.”

That’s something we can all agree on.

How about Paulette Wilson, who is 61 – a good age, but not one at which you wish to be removed from the country where you have lived for half a century and threatened with being deported to Jamaica, a country you haven’t visited for 50 years and where she you know no one, and no one knows you.

Paulette, incidentally, used to work as a cook in Parliament and has almost certainly served food to some of the heartless political zombies who thought up this horrible policy.

Paulette was placed in Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre for a week and then sent to Heathrow, where a last-minute intervention by her MP brought a reprieve – but no apology from the department Amber Rudd forgot she was running.

Or perhaps Amber was thinking of Albert Thompson (63), who has lived here for 44 years, working as a mechanic, and who now has cancer and has been told that he faces a bill from the NHS for £54,000 as he doesn’t qualify for free treatment.

“I’m very angry with the government. I’m here legally, but they’re asking me to prove I’m British,” Albert Thompson (not his real name) said to the Guardian. He was also dismayed by the NHS. “It feels like they are leaving me to die.”

There are many of these stories and they are worth looking up if you wish to make yourself despair.

How did we end up in this situation? Well, that bit’s easy: it’s down to Theresa May who is obsessed with vile (and often useless) immigration policies.

This is the woman, remember, who as Home Secretary asked landlords, banks and doctors to be deputised as unwilling immigration officers and told the authorities to “deport first, ask questions later”.

Then she sent those “go home vans” around London, with billboards on the side telling illegal immigrants they weren’t wanted here. A horrible bit of political gimmickry – and farcical, too. According to the New Statesman, 11 immigrants followed the instruction on billboards so nasty even Nigel Farage expressed second doubts.

After that, in her most stupid act, May turned against foreign students – you know, the ones that come here and spend their money; the ones that are good for the universities and the economy, bunging a reported extra £20bn into the economy; the ones that hopefully return home with a good impression of Britain.

Yes, those – everyone likes those students, apart from that stubborn woman in Number 10.

Labour MP David Lammy, who secured today’s debate, asked Amber Rudd if she could “tell the House how many have been detained as prisoners in their own country, how many have been denied access to health services, how many denied pensions and lost the jobs?”

Lammy blamed the “hostile immigration environment” nurtured by Theresa May.

Too true. And this is the woman, remember, who once lamented that the Conservatives were seen by too many as the “nasty party”. She seems to have rediscovered a nostalgic fondness for that old label.

Trump does like a bit of ballistic braggadocio, doesn’t he? After firing off a wave of air-strikes against Syria, he declares “Mission accomplished” but warns that he is “locked and loaded” for more.

Trying to pick your way through the wreckage is a morally messy business. If you wish to believe absurd headlines like the one in this morning’s Sunday Express – “A STRIKE AT THE HEART OF EVIL” –  the problem is solved.

Except that exactly a year ago, Trump ordered another air-strike to punish President Assad for using chemical weapons against his own people. If Assad has again used this vile form of attack, then the tactic is not, as it were, bomb-proof.

Chemical warfare is almost uniquely awful. And yet it must be a puzzle to the poor benighted people on the ground in Syria: they can be blown to pieces and in the wider nobody much minds. Bomb after bomb, year after year – seven years now that Assad has pursued this civil war, backed by Putin’s Russia, and people keep on dying.

There weren’t any good options over Syria. Sending in the missiles lets Trump swagger and boast. The US enjoy Nikki Haley calls the strikes “justified, legitimate and proportionate”, adding: “When our president draws a red line, our president enforces the red line.”

That man scrawls red lines all over the place, crosses them out, draws another in endless scribbled tweets. He’s unreliable, a narcissist, a nihilist and a proven liar. But sadly, right now he’s allowed to draw those red lines while declaring “God Bless America”.

Mrs Maybe was in such a rush to join in Trump’s missile party that she didn’t pause to consult Parliament. This will now lead to endless arguments, and she deserves to be criticised for her willingness to sanction action without a vote. A vote she knows she may well have lost, as David Cameron did from a stronger position. She side-stepped that one and went “trailing after Donald Trump”, according to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

I think Corbyn has a point there; but what would he have done if he was in power? He’s good at lobbing the verbal missiles, but would he ever give the nod the actual missiles? Is he too much of a pacifist for that; and is that peacefulness a bad thing anyway?

For all the swagger, and yes for all Trump’s ballistic braggadocio, what this is feels like is yet another western intervention in a troubled part of the world because “something had to be done”.

Was this a “good something” or a “bad something” – or was is just a “something-something” that makes big and bellicose men feel better about themselves for a while?

Was it a something that will make things better; or a something that will in time prove to have either been ineffective or a something that made things worse?

If you choose to believe newspapers such as the Sun on Sunday, Assad’s chemical weapon centres were wiped out in two minutes, “setting the capabilities back years”. Do we know that or are we just swallowing the propaganda pills?

Assad should be damned for using chemical weapons, but then we should be damned for standing back while he kills his own people – with reports suggesting that 500,000 have died so far, while millions of others have been turned into refugees.

Just what sort of mission has been accomplished it is hard to say right now; isn’t it?

WHILE Trump tweets the end of the world, I am going to go and hide on a squash court.

The behaviour of the US president is unsurprising by now. We are used to the Twitter rows – all infantile insult, belligerent swagger and primary-school syntax.

Sadly, we are no longer surprised that one of the world’s “great men” should choose to communicate by Twitter.

The international fall-out from the latest gas attack in Syria heralds relatively subtle political arguments in this country about whether Theresa May has to hold a Parliamentary vote before agreeing to join any US military strike.

Over in the president’s bedroom – or wherever it is he tweets from; the loo, perhaps (apologies for the appalling mental image) – it’s all down to Trump’s tiny tweeting fingers.

His latest incendiary tweet is much discussed in today’s newspapers. It’s a classic of how not to conduct yourself in a diplomatic manner. It goes like this: “Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and “smart!” You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!”

“We all knew, didn’t we, that this is what a Trump presidency would be like? But it still comes as a sobering shock to see the world teeter on a tweet”

No pause for doubt or fact-checking; no hesitating over consequences. Just tweet and be damned.

We all knew, didn’t we, that this is what a Trump presidency would be like? But it still comes as a sobering shock to see the world teeter on a tweet.

Here’s my biggest worry: as an arch narcissist Trump can’t imagine that the world will continue after he dies. The thought that everything might continue once he has gone will be too much to bear. So he might we well take the world with him.

Extreme, I know, but it is a worry.

ON NOW to squash. I am very taken by Eilidh Bridgeman and Caroline Laing, the Cayman Islands’ women’s squash doubles pairing at the Commonwealth Games.

They were defeated in their three pool games lasting no more than 12 minutes, giving up 66 points and scoring a modest 10.

In their final fixture, they lost 20 points in a row without reply, then eventually won one point – and this “prompted cheers from their own coach and timid smiles of their own”, according to the BBC sport website.

Laing said: “I was really hoping we would get a point, either through a mistake or because we won a point just so we could relax.”

Oh, how I feel their pain.

Reportedly, the match was “brutal yet inspiring to witness”. Unlike some of my matches that are brutal yet uninspiring to witness.

I’ve played squash for more than 30 years now, and I’m still not much cop. But never mind, it’s good exercise and I’ve almost learned not to throw my racquet about (broke too many).

Yesterday’s score against the opponent I never beat – Phil the Invincible – was 4-1, although I nearly snatched a magnificent defeat of 3-2. Last week, against Mike the Usually Valiant, I won 3-0 and that hardly even happens.

As for Trump and his tweeting fingers, do you think squash courts are bomb-proof by any chance?

TWO items on the TV news stir a mood of moral queasiness.

The first concerns the fall-out from the stabbing to death of a burglar in south-east London. The family of the dead man have made an impromptu shrine outside the house where he died.

Locals keep trying to destroy this memorial. A burly man wearing a woolly hat, and armed with a pair of scissors, was shown on the BBC1 news kicking the flowers laid in memory of the burglar. It is likely his actions had the support of local people, but he still looked like a thug playing up for the waiting TV cameras and photographers.

“Families repair shrine…vigilantes tear it down,” is the sub-heading in this morning’s Daily Star (not a newspaper I usually glance at).

Unsurprisingly, we have heard nothing yet from Richard Osborn-Brooks, who was arrested after the burglar died, although charges were quickly dropped. He has yet to go public with his side of the story. Maybe he will talk to one of the newspapers that rushed to his defence.

Mr Osborn-Brooks defended himself as was his right, but he also killed a man and he may not be feeling good about that.

Whatever the case, a thuggish-looking man kicking away a tacky memorial to a dead burglar does not help. But neither does a shrine attached to the fence of the house he’d broken into.

Was the man attacking the memorial a vigilante, as the Star suggests? No idea, but he looks the part.

BBC Look North led with a report on a group from Leeds who are vigilantes – proudly and belligerently so. I am not naming this group because I don’t feel like it, but Google will supply the answer.

Like other such groups, this one entraps people they assume to be paedophiles. They take the law into their own hands because they believe police aren’t up to the job.

The police insist they should leave hunting sexual offenders to them. But a judge muddied the waters in Newcastle last year by ruling that members of such a group could continue to pose as children online to catch sexual predators.

As long ago as 2013, the Guardian reported police as saying that the actions of vigilantes can be damaging to abuse victims as well as innocent people wrongly suspected.

A middle-aged victim of a sting told the Guardian his life had been ruined after he was caught waiting for an 18-year-old he’d “met” online. He had been lured in by vigilantes who sent a text while he waited in a cafe, saying that “she” was 15. The man got up to leave but was accosted in the street by vigilantes accusing him of wanting to have sex with a 15-year-old.

It’s fair to say that this man was a fool who deserves no sympathy; but it is also true that he had been entrapped. Who do you want to trust – self-styled anti-paedophile hunters or the police who are trained to do the job?

Moral queasiness of a different degree arises today on the question of whether Britain should join an international response to the suspected chemical attack in Syria.

According to the Times, Theresa May is resisting calls to join any action until more evidence is produced. Over in Telegraph-land, Mrs Maybe has given her “strongest signal yet” that Britain would not allow the use of chemical weapons to go unpunished.

The Daily Mail says it feels “very queasy indeed” about stepping into the “quagmire” of the Middle East.

Whatever we decide, you can’t help but conclude that the poor people on the ground will continue to suffer horribly, whether the world wrings its hands or sends in Mr Trump’s missiles. And should we trust the vigilante in the White House?

IT’S not often that I feel tall or young, but a visit to my mother puts that right.

Even five-foot eight looks vertiginous next to my mother, and a night out tasting pinot noir wines with her pals in the U3A allows me to flourish my youth credentials for a moment as – hey! – no one else is wearing Levi jeans.

At one point in the day I catch sight of us in a mirror and, yes, I look tall next to my 86-year-old mum, although if my sons were standing in line, I’d look small. Our eldest is six-ft two. Long ago he saw his parents at an event surrounded by tall people and he said that we looked small, as if he’d only just noticed.

In the day we go for a coffee and then go for a walk at Alderley Edge. My mum is running in a new hip and worries about her lack of fitness.

We walk for an hour or so. At the Edge the red sandstone escarpment falls away to a view of the Cheshire farmland running to the Peak District. Move around and you can see Manchester swanking in the distance.

Back home I drink tea, read Saturday’s newspaper and have a nap; we young people must keep up our strength, you see.

After tea, my mother goes to a meeting about plants instead of the wine-tasting. I know, some people. I am her understudy and walk slowly in the rain to the event with her partner.

It’s an enjoyable evening, as evenings spent drinking wine tend to be. We start with a champagne, then all the other wines are pinot noirs, running in price from £6.50 to £32. The cheapest wine is just what I’d expect because it’s the sort of wine I buy; the dearer wines aren’t as good as they are expensive, but that’s OK because I can’t run to those prices.

The sweet spot seems to be around the £15 mark – for which I’d normally expect two bottles – with a pinot from Tasmania winning the popular vote. On the way out, I give a Chilean pinot from the left-overs table another taste, and it is good, but still relatively pricey at around £13.

The man giving the presentation is interesting and amusing. The chatter from my mum’s partner and friends seems to concern health and ailments, but that’s the way with age.

Sitting in that church hall, swilling wine and looking around, two thoughts occur to me. One, this is a glance down the corridor to 20 years’ time; two, I’m not as young as I pretend to be.

On the way out, a woman who’d been at our table asks me if this was my first time. She is clutching one of the opened bottles – “Only the Aldi,” she says.

I explain about my role as an understudy, as if brushing off the notion that the University of the Third Age had any sort of relevancy to me. But then I realise that I would qualify if I’d stopped working. Nobody was thinking: “He looks a bit young to be here.” They were just wondering: “Who’s the new old boy?”

The U3A has been great for my mother and her partner, an endless great source of activities and friends. Perhaps when I am properly old I shall roll along under my own steam. For now, I’m still trying to cope with the muddy pastures running up to that Third Age.

If you want to thank the man responsible for the Open University, take the train to Huddersfield and step into St George’s Square. Outside the railway station, which resembles a mini stately home, you will find a fine statue of Harold Wilson.

The front page of the newspaper some of us love to hate has for once a good cause this morning– “SAVE THE OPEN UNIVERSITY!”

Top Tories are urging the Government the save the “ladder of opportunity” that’s being “crippled by cuts”, according to the Mail. The number of students enrolling on courses is said to have fallen by more than 25% in the past five years. In its leader column, the Mail hails the OU as a “powerful engine of social mobility” and pleads for the review of higher education fund to “make it a special case”.

“Top Tories” may be urging a change of heart now, but the Open University was very much a Labour idea – more than that, it was the inspirational whim of the man remembered in bronze outside Huddersfield railway station.

Harold Wilson was born in the town on March 11, 1916. His father, Herbert, was a chemist who worked on the production of explosives for use on the Western Front, as well as being a supporter of the Labour Party. His mother, Ethel, came from a family with a history of trade unionism.

Herbert later lost his job, and Wilson said that the spectre of unemployment was what formed his politics.

On the OU website you can find a few words from  Wilson, who says the decision to create the OU, then known as the University of the Air, “was a political act”.

He announced it as a firm commitment of the incoming Labour government in a speech in Glasgow on September 8,1963. Wilson writes that “the text and outline proposals had been written out by hand in less than an hour after church on the previous Easter Sunday morning. It was never party policy, nor did it feature in Labour’s election manifesto.

“But our political history is full of cases where the Prime Minister has a private hobby-horse and is determined to use the not inconsiderable resources of his office to get it through, whatever the opposition.”

Wilson managed to achieve this, and the Open University has been a credit to him ever since. Only now the vice-chancellor, Peter Horrocks, has announced plans to reduce the number of staff and cut courses.

Staff at the Open University last week passed a vote of no confidence in Horrocks. Members of the University and College Union said his position was no longer tenable after he claimed the OU had allowed “academics to get away with not teaching for decades”. He later apologised for his remarks.

The cuts to the OU and the threats to its existence were first reported in the Guardian last month, so the Mail arrives late to that party. The Mail often picks up or even snatches a baton held aloft by others. But it doesn’t matter who started this rallying call, and it is good for once to be able to welcome a Daily Mail front page.

A spokesman for the OU told the Guardian that the university was midway through an “ambitious programme to transform the way we teach and support our students”.

Just the sort of PR puffery you’d expect to hear from a spokesman tasked with defending what cannot be defended. And, on a personal level, a reminder  why I’d have been hopeless at those PR jobs I applied for when first cast out of the newspaper nearly three years ago.

The statue of Harold Wilson in Huddersfield was designed by sculptor Ian Walters and is based on photographs taken in 1964 – not long after he announced his idea for the OU.

A fine piece of work that was unveiled by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair in July 1999 – four years after Wilson’s death. Let’s hope Harold Wilson’s hobby-horse survives.

This album seemed to be everywhere when it was released in 1984 –the philosophical, self-absorbed background to being in your twenties in the 1980s.

Lloyd Cole was 23 when Rattlesnakes came out and had a headful of references to offload: everyone from Arthur Lee and Norman Mailer to Eva Marie Saint, Simone de Beauvoir and Truman Capote gets a mention.

Mailer earns one of the best-remembered lyrics, from the lovely closing track Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken? – “Read Norman Mailer. Or get a new tailor…”

Cole was part cultural nerd, part scruffy matinee idol, dipping into his well-stocked bookcase to pull out songs that were catchy and approachable, yet satisfyingly mysterious, too.

Cole and his Commotions only stayed together for five years, before he moved to the US and followed a solo path, one he still follows – older and greyer, like the rest of us, but still looking good.

So how does Rattlesnakes sound now when pulled from the record collection? The songs still resonate, but the production is very Eighties in a way that dates the album.

There’s no mistaking the era, and while a less cluttered, more acoustic production might have aged better, this is music of its time.

There is a precocious charm to the album that wins through, and those songs with their cinematic and literary references tacked onto their sleeve still work – Perfect Skin, Rattlesnakes, Forest Fire and 2cv, Four Flights Up, Patience and that stand-out closing track.

Mind you, Rolling Stone was sniffy at the time, saying that Cole was “having trouble finding his own voice” and too much of the album sounded like Lou Reed, Tom Verlaine or Bob Dylan.

Even RS had a few kind words for Cole’s debut – “if Rattlesnakes arrives critically short of the greatness claimed for it in the British rock press, its promise is not to easily dismissed”.

I think our rock press spotted something Rolling Stone did not and have enjoyed digging this one out again. Mostly it’s the music, but partly it’s the memories, too. I went a few flight down to rediscover this one, but it was easily worth the effort.

HOW many bars and coffee shops does a city a need? This question popped into my mind yesterday while drinking a flat white. Nice place, good coffee – and another £2.50 down the caffeine drain. A small cup, too.

It’s a good job York contains so many people willing and able to step up to the coffee mark. Where would this city be without the selfless many who are prepared to lay down our cash and our sleep in the name of progress?

And when we’ve done keeping ourselves awake with coffee, we can always make ourselves sleepy with food and booze in all the cafes and restaurants.

There are more places to eat in York than you can shake a crusty baguette at. Whether this is a good thing depends on a calculation made by multiplying your waist measurement by your overdraft.

I’d say it’s mostly for the good, although there is a cost to the city – like a hidden service charge on the bill for a meal. The bars and cafes and restaurants are moving in on us, as if in some calorific horror story by Edgar Allan Poe: soon we’ll all be squeezed to nothing.

Two interesting reports address this from slightly different directions. A study for YorkMix finds that 42 shops in central York have been turned into cafes, restaurants or bars in only eight years. A further ten, the study says, could also be set to change following recent planning decisions.

It’s a sterling piece of work that illustrates the fatty paradox of life in this city. Many people feel there are too many bars and restaurants in York, yet those places are often heaving.

A long and detailed report in the Guardian of March 29 has been shared often on social media in York. This is headlined: “How to bring a high street back from the dead” and uses Bishopthorpe Road in York as an example of how to buck the trend.

Bishy Road is crammed with local shops, cafes and restaurants, and has successfully reinvented itself by putting a modern spin on the old high street.

Kevin Rushby’s report points out something also mentioned in YorkMix: that some restaurants are struggling, with chains such as Jamie’s Italian and Bryon Burgers losing around 30 outlets between them, while Prezzo is closing 94 restaurants.

Rushby’s take on Bishy Road is that it has managed to “revive and reinvent itself during one of the harshest retailing recessions ever” – in contrast to the once-flourishing Coney Street, where 20% of units lie empty. And, yes – what a sorry sight that street is right now.

Both studies are worth seeking out online. What I take from them is the importance of local shops and businesses – and the need to encourage small, start-up businesses, as will be happening soon with the long-delayed opening of SparkYork, with its mix of restaurants, street-food bars and businesses.

Plenty of people in York like to moan about the community space made from repurposed shipping containers. Let them whinge – here’s hoping it will be a great success.

York has already seen the rise of street-food places around Shambles market, and these small, locally-run places offer a much better experience that the chains.

But it is easy to romanticise the idea of local shops and local businesses, while not supporting them. This point has been whispered into my ear by my wife; or possibly bellowed, it’s hard to say. She has worked for years in a local healthfood shop in York and is very hot on the need for people to use local shops.

MANY of today’s front pages relay the story of the 78-year-old south London pensioner said to have killed a burglar.

Richard Osborn-Brooks is the sort of hero loved by newspapers: he defended himself, his property and his disabled wife, and now he is being held for murder.

While the newspapers were still putting their pages together, the never less than unsavoury Aaron Banks was already pushing that populist bandwagon down the eager hill of public opinion on Twitter.

Like many of this morning’s newspapers, Banks was upset by the injustice of the case.

To fill in for a moment, Banks is the man who funded the LEAVE.EU campaign and was once the largest donor to UKIP, until the party asked him to leave. Yes, this is the man even UKIP had to suspend in the end.

A man infamous for his intolerant views on anything and everything to do with race; the man who seeks attention through his racism and name-calling, often of Muslims.

Not a man you want on your side.

The eagerness to defend Mr Osborn-Banks is understandable. He is a brave everyman figure. He is any one of us grabbing what comes to hand: said in this case to have been a screwdriver.

Reportedly there were two burglars: one was fatally injured and the other was still at large at the time of writing.

Mr Osborn-Banks is, perhaps oddly, seen in the newspapers holding two pints of Guinness. Was this picture the only one available or are the papers trying to say something about his hearty ordinary good-blokeness? No idea, but it’s a question to ask.

This is the sort of case the newspapers love, from the Mirror, Express and Daily Mail to the Daily Telegraph: all splash on the story, ready to tap the well of injustice.

Let’s pause for a moment. While feeling every sympathy for Mr Osborn-Banks, what else could the police do but arrest him? The law must run its course, and in this case the law may well find that there is no charge to bring because of the circumstances.

It isn’t for police on the ground to decide that a good sort killed a bad sort. It isn’t for newspapers to decide, either. Newspapers like an instant cause or a ready injustice. They want exclamatory headlines, they want to kick up a fuss, because that’s what newspapers do.

Nothing wrong with that, but the law must operate above the emotive shouting.

The story as reported today is a heat-of-the-moment row about a matter that may be settled to general satisfaction at a later stage.

Those who defend their homes can be convicted, as happened to the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin, who shot dead 16-year-old burglar Fred Barras in 1999. He served three years for murder, although the charge was reduced to manslaughter on appeal.

Mr Martin’s case led to acres of comment and he wasn’t an entirely sympathetic figure. He later said in an interview: “Why should I be bloody remorseful. Let’s put it like this. Those people had no business being here. They were just putrescence.”

Mr Martin killed Barras with an illegally held pump-action shotgun, Mr Osborn-Banks grabbed a screwdriver. With good sense the law will see a scale of difference there.

So many words are being spent on antisemitism in Labour. Here are a few more.

Is this really a thing or just another example of modern media hysteria? Well, it’s not nothing, whatever the fans of Jeremy Corbyn insist on social media, with their jokey/aggressive memes mocking the very idea of their man being any sort of a racist.

But is Jeremy Corbyn any sort of a racist? Er, no – even his worst enemies must concede that point.

So does he have a problem or is it all a right-wing media conspiracy? Well, he does have a problem because the hostile headlines are akin to a media version of the nerve agent used in Wiltshire. Salisbury is said to face months of decontamination; and the Labour Party might face a similar period of cleansing.

If Corbyn is not any sort of a racist, what’s the problem? Well, his politics are set and nothing will change that. Allied to that, he has difficulties criticising anyone on the left (hence an allegiance to the left-wing version of Russia that no longer exists). And his judgement is sometimes not entirely sound.

But does he deserve this morning’s headline: “How low can you get, Mr Corbyn”? I can’t be bothered naming the newspaper as it’s easy to get obsessed. Is that headline reasonable? No, of course it isn’t, or it wouldn’t have ended up on the page.

The cause of that scolding headline was Corbyn’s decision to attend a Passover event hosted by a left-wing Jewish group highly critical of mainstream Jewish bodies. He took part in the seder, the traditional meal of the Jewish festival, organised by Jewdas, which confronts mainstream Jewish opinion, as represented by the Jewish Board of Deputies and others.

Corbyn is reported to have taken along horseradish from his allotment, a key ingredient for the meal. That’s rather sweet in a jam-making, grow-your-own way. Whether attending such an event at the height of a row about antisemitism was wise is a matter as fiery as that horseradish.

Plenty of his own MPs are not impressed, but Corbyn remains typically defiant, saying: “I learned a lot. Isn’t that a good thing?”

He attended privately, apparently not telling party officials, and is said to have enjoyed meeting young left-wing Jews.

The group itself says: “The truth is that we love Judaism and Jewish culture, as every one of our events demonstrate. To claim that we in Jewdas are somehow ‘not real Jews’ is offensive, and frankly antisemitic.”

On Twitter the Jewish comedian David Baddiel wrote of Jewdas: “They are just Jews who disagree with other Jews. Which means: Jews … To make out that it’s somehow antisemitic for him to spend Seder with them just because they’re far left is balls.”

Well, yes – easy to agree with that smart contribution. But was Corbyn’s judgement awry in attending such an event at the height of a row about antisemitism? He certainly turned a deaf ear to the consequences, but that’s always been his character, for good or ill.

The Daily Mirror cautions that the controversy is merely an example of “political opportunism”. Another fair point. But this is also an example of how a situation can spin out of control.

In conclusion: all this is not nothing, but it’s not the ‘something’ it’s cracked up to be. Less than helpful, I know, but there you go.