Congratulations to the artist formerly known as Lorraine Kelly, for taking the gong for this weekend’s most tasteless media appearance. Having repeatedly failed to turn up to host her own show on ITV, the self-styled ‘chatty persona’ decided to take a turn on a rival channel, pitching up to Times Radio on Saturday for an interview on – what else? – her travel plans.
The Scottish sage moaned to host Hugo Rifkind about the ‘awful’ post-Brexit queues, declaring that ‘people were lied to’ and ‘didn’t know’ what they voted for in the 2016 EU referendum. ‘I’m fed up with going away to Europe and kind of apologising, you feel embarrassed’ she added. But it was what followed which really distinguished Kelly from the standard Remainer fare. She told Rifkind about returning from Scotland’s recent international football match against Germany:
Coming back though, again, we nearly missed our flight. Because they had all this, and it’s this kind of segregation, you feel like some kind of like untermensch, you know, you are standing in this other queue for ages and then you have to go up to a different place to get your passport looked at and all the rest of it and it’s just awful and it’s going backwards.
‘Untermensch’ of course means ‘subhuman’, and was the Nazis’ infamous way of referring to Jews, Roma, and other peoples they targeted for genocide. As Tory peer Lord Wolfson noted:
A few generations back, my family knew what it was to be treated as an “untermensch”. And they also had to stand in long queues. But not for passports.
Something for Kelly to reflect on perhaps.
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