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Chairman KeithVaz smiled in a buttery, pitying fashion

Their Excellencies the ambassadors of Romania and Bulgaria descended on the Home Affairs  select committee, teatime-ish, to discuss immigration.

How many people from those two splendid new EU countries are going to leg it our way, crying ‘British child benefits, goody-goody-gumdrops!’, once the legal barriers have dropped like the starter’s flag in the Grand National?

Two diplomats, very different chaps. The Romanian, Ion Jinga, had the fine-boned bearing of a jockey. Short, Italianate, a little nervous, he spoke in a staccato manner, not always easy for this cloth-eared sketchwriter to pick up from the far side of the room.

Bulgarian Ambassador, Konstantin Dimitrov (left) and Romanian Ambassador, Ion Jinga (right) descended on the Home Affairs  select committee to discuss immigration

David Winnick (Lab, Walsall N), whose hearing is even mouldier than mine, frowned like a man trying to tune to Hilversum on shortwave radio on a windy night. Committee chairman Keith Vaz (Lab, Leicester E) smiled in a buttery, pitying fashion, not necessarily understanding a word.

‘VERY helpful,’ said Mr Vaz after one particularly spaghetti-ish answer.

Beside Monsieur Jinga sat the Bulgarian, Konstantin Dimitrov. To say that he ‘sat’ there is insufficient, really. More accurately, he luxuriated there.

Committee chairman Keith Vaz smiled in a buttery, pitying fashion, not necessarily understanding a word

He was enthroned there. He had conquered his seat, colonised it, established it as Bulgarian  sovereign territory. And he knew his rights. Monsieur Dimitrov  was the most self-assured of plenipotentiaries, an essay in self-delight – yet for all that, not entirely diplomatic.

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His noble eyes gazed down a nose as straight as a six-inch ruler. His delicate fingers toyed lightly with the corners of his tenor lips. Round his lower chops perched a goatee beard so neatly trimmed, so perfecto in its contours, that it could have been a green at Troon, or something from the nudie beach south of Rio de Janeiro.

Of the two visitors, M Dimitrov was the more fluent in English and the more self-assured. With eyebrows near regal, he spoke of his full expectation that Bulgarians’ juicy dues under European legislation will be delivered by the British taxpayer.

He found time to make sniffy allusion to our economic  difficulties. When asked if the thousands of ‘self-employed’ Bulgars who are already here might sign up to PAYE once they have full EU rights, he said he could not comment on the ‘individual professional profiles’ of these ‘hard-working Bulgarians’.

Yet perhaps there was a hint of Clouseau to him, too. Shortly before the session began, while some other business was being done, M Dimitrov had been at the back of the room and had started yarning into his mobile telephone. Tut tut. Against the rules, that sort of thing.

A committee clerk sidled up and asked him to put an end to his conversation. Rather than comply forthwith, M Dimitrov lowered himself behind the seats, so that he was almost lying on the adjacent chairs, flat on his side. All the while he kept murmuring into his blower in a secretive manner. Bagging himself a table for two at Pizza Hut, perhaps.

Mr Vaz pressed the envoys repeatedly to say how many of their fellow citizens would be descending on Britain. Neither seemed keen to say. ‘We don’t have any estimates,’ drawled M Dimitrov, before eventually coughing up a figure of ‘eight to ten thousand, who knows?’ A shrug.

He deplored the ‘bombastic interpretations’ made by the British media of this issue. Such snooty grandeur!

‘Is that per year?’ said Mr Vaz, who noted that some estimates have  gone as high as 153,000 for Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants. M Dimitrov wafted aside his hand.  Puh-lease. Could Mr Vaz not see he was busy?

M Jinga, generally a positive Ion, flattered Mr Vaz. Publicity-shy Keith always loves that. Mr Vaz eventually extracted from the Romanian,  with the difficulty of a fang bandit removing a rear molar, the guess that 25,000 Romanians may arrive here next year.

‘I’m quite good at mathematics,’ said M Jinga at speed. ‘I do not mix maths and sociology. Not like Migrationwitch!’ He was referring to MigrationWatch, a pressure group.

‘Both ambassadors,’ said Mr Vaz archly, ‘have been EXTREMELY helpful.’



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