Peter Moore: From any 'Angle,' Rishi Sunak is English

I am sometimes surprised. How can anyone argue against the blindingly obvious?

I am not talking about politics or even ideas which are disputed. How can the American conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson suggest that the world is flat? This is the country that sent men to the moon. Just look in the rear-view mirror on a moon probe.

Candace Owen, another American conspiracy theorist, claims that Brigitte Marcon, the wife of the French president, is actually a man. Perhaps in a country where the president has had three wives and still makes offensive misogynistic comments, he cannot understand how any man could marry a woman 25 years older.

One recent claim in this country which I find equally baffling is the suggestion that Rishi Sunak is not English.

Someone born in Southampton who went to school in Winchester and on to Oxford is as English as fish and chips. His father was a first-generation immigrant and his mother holds a dual nationality but that does not mean he is not English  anymore than suggesting that Torquay Pavilion is not English because it has Italian Carrara-enamelled stoneware from Italy.

This bizarre idea was not proposed by mad right-wing extremists. Rishi Sunak’s own former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, herself the daughter of immigrants, claimed that neither of them are truly English but British Asians. Only ancestry, heritage and ethnicity make one truly English.

This argument makes me feel uncomfortable. Although coming from people of colour, will this encourage racism? Would anyone use the same argument about the child of immigrants from Australia, New Zealand or Canada? Winston Churchill’s mother was American and Brunel’s father was French. Does that mean that they were not English?

The problem with Suella Braverman’s argument is that there is no such thing as the English race.

England is named after the Angles, who arrived on these islands from central Europe in about 400 AD, accompanied by the Saxons and Jutes. They displaced the Celts. This creates a problem for us in the South West as many of the Celts ended up here. The Angles did not get this far, probably because they were stuck on the A303.

This was after England had been occupied by the Romans but before the Normans, Vikings and Danes. Are we going to restrict the name English to people descended from the Angles, obviously not the Saxons or Jutes?

Does this also mean that Jewish people cannot really be English? Not only would this exclude David Baddiel, Matt Lucas and Adam Kay but also Benjamin Disraeli. Is anyone going to claim that Sid James in the Carry On films was not English because he had a Jewish background? Oliver, which is back in the West End, is by the Jewish English cockney composer Lionel Bart.

Surely no one has more of an English sense of humour than Lenny Henry or Romesh Ranganathan.

Unfortunately, as there are so few people of colour in South Devon, there is an underlying racism in some of the population. At one time we had a doctor working in my practice who was the son of Ugandan Asians thrown out by Idi Amin. He went to school in Newton Abbot and went to a British university.

When people politely asked me, “Where is he from?” I enjoyed smiling and saying Newton Abbot. Not only was he English but, even better, he was a Devonian.

In 1990 the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit suggested the “cricket test” as the test of true integration. Does someone from India or Pakistan support the English cricket team?

A colleague who was also the Torquay United team doctor has emigrated to Australia and is now an Australian citizen. Although we are still in touch, I have never dared ask him who he wants to win the Ashes.

And if we apply Suella Braverman’s ideas to other sports, we would not have an English football team.

There is no doubt that Rishi Sunak is English. The more controversial question is whether my friends in Cornwall consider themselves English.