Goodness, there’s another row between the Daily Express and the EU. On this occasion, the Spanish – at the very least – have said that those Brits living in Spain, as we delicately put it on Facebook, ‘under the radar’ – that’s to say, without the appropriate paperwork – will be summarily ejected from the country when discovered.
If we might assume that this will be the case for all of the EU-27, not such a leap perhaps, then there will soon be quite a large number of tearful Brits waiting on the quayside for one of London’s fine destroyers to dock.
One can imagine the call from the captain: ‘Form an orderly queue please (they already had, of course). You can bring with you one small suitcase, no pets and no foreign companions’.
Bickering between themselves as to whether they were expats (or exexpats) or rather immigrants, the deported Brits shuffle slowly forward to the gangplank.
‘I suppose this is all to do with Brexit’, says one redundantly.
The problem doesn’t end there.
As they disembark at the other end, in some British port far away from the eyes of the press, they will wonder what will become of them. This isn’t a re-run of Dunkirk – nobody in the UK wants anything to do with this.
Neither their relatives, anxious about the spare-bedroom and the drinking problem, nor the Home Office - notoriously unhelpful when it comes to dealing with new settlers from abroad - will wonder if they were in any way responsible for the 200,000 or so refugees who would be preparing themselves, in that British way we have, into making something of a fuss.
The UK is not the same as GB, as any number-plate enthusiast can tell you, because now it’s just another foreign country.
There's nothing else for it but to keep checking the Daily Express to see how this issue is coming along.