Motivations aside, this of course throws up the ultimate question which our politicians remain too paralysed to address: how much longer must all this go on? Are we approaching the end of this transformation? Is change at this pace the new norm? Or only the beginning?

The census provided a wonderful opportunity to address this, and it was, like everything else in this supremely dishonest discussion, wretchedly missed. Perhaps one could put the pertinent question like this: is the fact that "white Britons" are now a minority in their capital city a demonstration of "diversity" as the man from the ONS said? If so, when does it cease to be so? There are London boroughs already lacking in "diversity" because there aren't enough white people around to make them diverse.

But what levels, after all's said and done, do the celebrants of diversity want to get to? What is their ideal target figure? Is a ceiling of 25 per cent white Britons in London — or the country at large — optimal? Or would it be 10 per cent? Or none at all? A final, and perhaps harder, question: how — given the concatenation of claims against them — might "white Britons" ever acceptably argue, let alone complain, about such unspecified or unspecifiable odds?

The answer remains for now that nobody can tell us, and nobody can address this. Here is Self again, speaking to wild applause from his Question Time studio audience:

"The people who line up on the opposition to the immigration line of the argument are usually racists [audience applause] . . . [with an] antipathy to people, particularly with black and brown skins."