Pity the Tory’s Shadow Immigration Minister, Humfrey Malins, whose own party has managed to put him in rather a bind.

On the one hand, as the shadow junior minister responsible for immigration policy he’s duty bound to push the party line on immigrations - it’s a bad, bad thing and needs to be rigidly controlled. On the other hand he finds himself fighting a constituency - Woking) in which he has the views of Muslim voters to consider, voters from whom the Tories hard-line approach to immigration is going to go down like a lead ballon.

What’s a boy to do when faced with such a dilemma?

Easy. Use two different sets of leaflets, one in English for his white voters, extolling the virtues of being tough on immigration and tough on the causes of immigration and the other, in Urdu and delivered only to Asian households, informing them just how helpful he’s been in trying to ’smooth the way for them to bring their loved ones to the UK’.

At the last general election, Malins took the seat with a 15% or so lead over his nearest challengers, the Lib Dems. Interestingly, however, the Labour vote last time round was 20% of the local electorate, not enough to come through from third to win the seat this time but certainly big enough to make ‘decapitation’ a possibility, especially as its likely to be safe to assume that the majority of Muslims votes, last time around went to Labour.

Look, I don’t think I need to spell it out, here, but if you’re a Labour voter in Woking and you read this then it may be worth thinking long and hard about whether your best interests lie in being absolutely loyal to the party or in loaning the Lib Dems your vote and shafting a Tory hypocrite - whatever you decide, I’m sure you’ll do the right thing.

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