The viler, more antisocial elements among the readership may not have been watching Sir Charles Montgomery of the UK Border Force in front of the Public Accounts committee just now.

In short, if you want to evade the UK’s state-of-the-art border control system you can probably risk a walk through.

The chairman Margaret Hodge suggested that no one – or almost no one – had been stopped coming into the country.

This was resisted by the officials. Four people in the last six weeks alone had been stopped or prevented from entering the country. This achievement stood in spite of the block deletion of 650,000 records and “hundreds of thousands” of false positives as the department’s £500m computer system flails around, threshing data.

But back to you degenerates – to be completely sure of getting your illegal self laden with contraband into the country – come by private plane and land at one of hundreds of private airfields. It’s a free pass.

And that’s official.

NB: a small light aircraft consumes about as much fuel as a 3-litre car.