Here’s a quiz. Not a very good quiz because you will know the answer before you’ve finished reading the question. Whether you can comprehend it is another matter. An awful lot of immigrants are allowed into Britain these days and very few deported because they are undesirable. However, as a nation we must draw the line somewhere. So, using your understanding of How Britain Is, estimate which of the following four aspirant British citizens has been told to get out and stay out. And which three can stay?

1) Mouloud Sihali, Algerian. Lived at Finsbury Park mosque, breeding ground of Islamic terrorism. Described in court as “unprincipled and dishonest”. Illegal immigrant.

2) Yonis Dirie, Somalian. Drug addict, armed robber and burglar. Convicted of raping a young woman in London. Illegal immigrant.

3) Tul Bahadur Pun VC, Nepalese. Won the Victoria Cross for taking out a Japanese machinegun post in 1944 in Burma single-handedly. Now 84, of unblemished conduct, suffering from heart problems and diabetes and would like treatment here. Legal applicant.

4) “AS”, Libyan. Islamic extremist involved with Milan terrorist group. Court accepts that he is likely to try to kill us all again quite soon. Illegal immigrant.

You got it, didn’t you? Old Pun’s application was rejected because - and here’s another punchline, in case the first wasn’t funny enough - he “failed to demonstrate” that he had “strong ties with Britain”. How much stronger do you want? There can be hardly a soul who wouldn’t be happy to have Pun here. And not one who could make a case for allowing Dirie, the robber-rapist, say, to get preferential treatment. Some of us would have happily dispatched him back to Mogadishu strapped to a missile.

There is no great objection to immigration in this country; the objection is to how it is done and who benefits, exemplified by the cases I quote above.

I suspect the public feels there are people who should be allowed in - people to whom we owe a profound debt of gratitude (like Pun), or those whose countries we have let down in one way or another (such as the Hong Kong Chinese or the black Zimbabweans). And yet it seems we do precisely the opposite.

Libyan and Algerian extremists who feel the regimes in their home countries are not sufficiently rigorous are allowed to stay because we worry they might be bumped off at home - regardless of what threat they pose to us.

I would vote for any party that pledged to extricate us from the international legislation that insists on such absurdities.

By then, however, it will most likely be too late for Tul Bahadur Pun VC. The Japs couldn’t kill him - but we’re not making a bad job of it.

Baubles from memsahib Cherie

Two impostors infiltrated the Asian Women of Achievement Awards. Elizabeth Hurley and Cherie Booth – a person also known to use the name Cherie Blair when there’s enough moolah on the table - sneaked into the ceremony pretending to be Asian women, dressed in hastily knocked-up saris. Of course they are not Asian women at all (and we will let the matter as to whether they are “women of achievement” remain on file). Nobody was fooled for a moment. It is a mystery as to what they were up to. Perhaps they simply felt excluded from this annual jamboree. Indeed, it’s a puzzle why there should be Asian Women of Achievement Awards, given that British Asian women are extraordinarily well integrated and hugely successful in almost everything to which they turn their hands. Does the excellent newsreader Riz Latif, for example, need a bauble that smacks of the ghetto when she could wipe the floor with most of her white colleagues? Isn’t it a bit demeaning? Perhaps that’s the point Cherie and Liz were trying to make. Some say they were there to hand out prizes, like beneficent memsahibs. In which anachronistic case, why not dress up like Peggy Ashcroft in A Passage to India?

Divorce - it’s the easy way for a girl to get ahead

The old Spare Rib feminists of the 1970s used to assert, with great bile, that marriage was nothing more than institutionalised prostitution. Well, perhaps - but they cannot have dreamt that it would become such extraordinarily lucrative prostitution. I suspect that they must be tempted to put on their lippy and give it a go. Beverley Charman has just been awarded £48m of her husband’s money now that they have divorced. Despite their verdict, the judges in the case seemed sort of aghast and called for the government to “clarify” the law. London has now become the deepest pit of financial hell for men who separate from their wives. And there has been no concomitant balancing when it comes to custody matters and parental rights. It is a strange irony, if you were one of those Spare Rib feminists, that despite all the successful campaigning to bring about equal rights in the workplace, the biggest transfer of wealth from men to women has come about through that institutionalised prostitution, marriage and its nemesis, divorce.

* * * * *

No matter how great your commitment to apologising for slavery, it is surely dwarfed by the enormous remorse shown by John Prescott. The deputy prime minister has been saying sorry with great fervour on a £50,000 trip to America and the Caribbean, paid for by you and I, to mark the 200th anniversary of Britain’s decision to end its involvement in the slave trade. To show how seriously he takes the matter, Prescott has been staying in some top-notch hotels. But even this might have been insufficient and there was a suggestion he might spend an extra week in Barbados and Jamaica (presumably so he could say sorry in person to everyone). Not true, his press office “clarified” last night; he’ll be back at his desk on Tuesday. Their loss is our gain.

* * * * *

I used to think Ofcom, the television regulator, consisted of some agreeable old cove in a worn Arran sweater sitting down watching the box all day, maybe with an underling to make the tea and work the VHS when Big Brother was about to start. Of course it’s not like this at all. It is a vast, monstrous, corporate behemoth employing enough people to fill one of those closed nuclear cities in the former Soviet Union. Just this week there are a dozen or so lucrative jobs up for grabs - get your application in for the post of information compliance manager or fairness case manager. Ofcom is growing exponentially, like Japanese knotweed - and the bigger it gets, the more pompous and sententious it sounds.

In demanding Channel 4 apologise for racism on Big Brother, it announced it took bullying or racism on TV “extremely seriously” and would have none of it. What a strange assertion: does Ofcom mean bullying or racism shouldn’t be shown, when it occurs? That TV should pretend these two unpleasant facts of life don’t exist because otherwise we sensitive plebs might get upset?

In truth there was nothing for Channel 4 to apologise for, apart from spewing the usual bilge at us, but Ofcom felt it had to do something. And that self-important little statement was the best it could come up with.

Times Recommends

• It's time to take on the gangsters of the sea
• Déjà vu: six steps that make up a great panic
• Biographies that cast long shadows