Peter Rhodes on missing migrants, lockdown flyers and asking the right questions at inquiries

But the sheer scale of today's immigration statistics is unparalleled.

Even allowing for the smaller GB population in days of old, the figures which caused so much alarm back then, are utterly dwarfed by last year's net immigration total, revealed last week, of 745,000.

Unchecked, this could become a deeply problematic issue. For years, those who complained about immigration were called racists. What do we call them now, the majority?

More to the point, what do we call those who are supposed to register, interview and process migrants?

A Commons committee heard a few days ago that the Home Office has no idea of the whereabouts of 17,306 “asylum seekers” whose claims had been rejected.

As Oscar Wilde might have put it, to lose one asylum seeker may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose 17,306 asylum seekers looks like blithering incompetence.

Yet another dodgy phone call, this time claiming that my credit card has been used to buy a plane ticket from Manchester to New York.

I always assumed the crooks rang a million punters a day in the hope of catching one or two dimwits. But a friend who knows about such things says the fake-call scammers are happy to be detected by more astute folk, because those numbers can be deleted from the list used in their next scam.

Every smart sceptic they eliminate from their call list means more time available for trapping the others. You think you're being clever by telling them to shove off but you're actually playing their game.

There's an unasked question at the Covid 19 inquiry. Those of us living beneath airport flight paths noticed that although flights were vastly reduced during lockdown, many aircraft, including executive jets, were still passing over.

Who were these people? How was it possible for them to jet around the world while the rest of us were self-isolating? Did they catch a better class of Covid? We should be told.