Amber Rudd

Poor Pavlina was in floods of tears this morning after I casually mentioned that she was to be given a special trip back to Bulgaria. I knew this because that sweet, caring and compassionate Mrs Rudd popped in and ordered me to give her a list of all my foreign employees quick smart. She even gave me a nice yellow pen to mark them with a little star on my list of employees.

I wasn’t absolutely sure why, but Mrs Rudd reassured me it was so the government could give all the foreigners special treatment, and would meet half the cost of a visit home to see their parents - just as long as they left their passports behind on the way out.

Well, imagine my surprise when that Mike ‘Right’ Hookem popped in as I was completing the form. I thought he was in Europe, but it turns out he’d left the country for some reason, and started banging on about a Woolfe in sheep’s clothing and how, as UKIP’s defence secretary, he favoured a ‘well hard Brexit’. Then he bought a copy of The Stage (PatsMart price: £3) and left.

Anyway, you couldn’t accuse Pavlina of acting. At the end of her 14-hour shift, she still didn’t seem to understand what I was saying, despite her PhD in English Philology from Harvard. The tears just kept coming.

So it was even more of a surprise when Mrs Rudd came in next day looking all sheepish to say that she was only joking about the list. All that red tape for nothing.

I tried to laugh it off by telling poor old Pavlina it was just our British sense of humour but she didn’t seem to see the funny side of it at all. And like my column this week, it isn’t very funny when you come to think of it, really, is it?