Asked for help by a Spanish government struggling with waves of illegal immigrants, the EU has said it has neither additional money nor resources to allocate. One can’t help wondering whether this rebuff reflects lingering irritation at Spain’s unilateral move last year to regulate the presence of hundreds of thousands of ‘paperless’ residents who can now move northwards to other EU member countries. Or maybe it's because Spain already gets 80% of the relevant budget.

Coincidentally, a report today suggests that Spain’s high level of economic growth over the last decade owes a great deal to the influx of immigrants. In fact, it goes so far as to say the numbers would have been negative without this boost. In retrospect, perhaps it’s only fair they were allowed to stay.

And still on this subject . . . As you'd expect, illegal immigrants use a thousand pretexts to justify entry into Spanish territory. But none as surreal, say the police, as a group of Algerians who landed from a raft in one of the north African enclaves and claimed they were British citizens who’d left their papers in their hotel. In Gibraltar, presumably.

Finally, a headline from one of the UK’s serious broadsheet newspapers, which only last week was bemoaning the falling levels of literacy in the country - Patients go hungary as busy nurses have no time to feed them.