ONE man I regret I never met was Nubar Gulbenkian. He died in 1972, while I was still a young whippersnapper. Among the richest people in the world, he came of a line of Armenian entrepreneurs who took an important part in the early exploitation of oil in the Middle East. Yet the role he liked to play was that of an eccentric gentleman, with his silken cravat, diamond pin and big cigar.

Fabulously wealthy as his family were, their most permanent monument lies in their philanthropy. The foundation set up by Calouste Gulbenkian, Nubar’s father, uses an endowment of €3 billion to aid the arts, science and education on a global scale.

During the Second World War, Calouste served as an Iranian, and therefore neutral, diplomat in Paris. Exploiting his father’s immunity, Nubar organised an underground railway for RAF pilots who had survived getting shot down over France and could be smuggled home again. If he had been caught he would no doubt have headed straight into a concentration camp, but he was too clever for the Nazis.

Yet to me Nubar is still more memorable for his definition of a gourmet evening: “The best number for a dinner party is two – myself and a damn good waiter.”

It reminds us that only in the culture of the English-speaking world, and in particular in the present UK government, can a waiter’s job ever be regarded as a menial one. True, this feeling fades as you rise up the social scale, to vanish in restaurants of the highest culinary quality and seeking staff to match.

But there is an effect when expectations are lower. In Scotland, for example, our standards are still often slovenly, in line with much of the food.

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In my view it is one of the big problems with our tourist industry, ingrained rather than effaced by the inanities of VisitScotland. Yet go to, say, Martin Wishart or Ondine, and you will see how things should be done.

Compare the Latin nations, France or Italy or Spain, where an expert manner and a fund of specialist information are universal qualifications for a waiter in attendance at a good table. Once in a French restaurant, I asked what a sauce choron was: it’s a tomato-flavoured sauce béarnaise, or herby hollandaise. The waiter gave me a full explanation, including instructions on how to stop it curdling if that should threaten. In the Gallic way, his profession was to him a matter of pride, not least for the encounters it afforded him with knowledgeable customers to their mutual pleasure and satisfaction. That’s what you call a skill.

All this is by way of introduction to the subject of the ghastly Home Secretary, Priti Patel. If she tries to treat her senior civil servants as doormats, to be wrung out and hung up to dry when too wet, heaven knows how she behaves herself in a restaurant or with any lesser mortals in between.

But then this is a woman who, had she been applying her proposed rules and regulations to the Ugandan Asians when these suffered expulsion by President Idi Amin in 1972, would have kept her own father out of the UK. Almost worse still is the smug smirk with which she delivers her shattering banalities.

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We can only assume Boris has put her in his cabinet so he can throw her to the wolves when things get a bit tougher for him than they are now.

The Prime Minister has one basic idea of government, that he will take measures to promote his own popularity, especially among English voters, which by extension will promote the popularity of the Tory party. Therefore, cut immigration.

It is not a profound idea and perhaps somewhere in the recesses of Dominic Cumming’s brain there is a better one. For example, the shortage of labour likely to result from tighter immigration controls could force employers to raise the productivity of the workforce they already employ, with new technology or other investment.

Yet there are important economic sectors that depend, and must always depend, on being labour-intensive. Hospitality is one, agriculture and social care are two more. No technology exists or can exist to make it easier to pick strawberries; these have to be harvested, one by one and two by two, at the hands of human beings with nimble fingers. No technology exists to make it easier to empty bedpans in an old folks’ home; these have to be cleaned, one by one and two by two, at the hands of carers with strong stomachs.

The National: The agricultural industry relies heavily on seasonal European labourThe agricultural industry relies heavily on seasonal European labour

It does not seem to me to matter much whether we define these employees as skilled or unskilled. The fact is they do jobs nobody else will do. At the moment most of them are foreigners. Who will take the same jobs when the Poles or the Romanians are banned from our shores? I suspect there will be nobody to take these jobs.

At that point (or at different points in different sectors), Patel’s pretty system will start breaking down. The Tory party has won over lots of new voters in England, but it would not have gained its absolute majority without its traditional support. This includes a big lead among people aged over 65, who are besides a growing part of the population.

Even in my distant days as a Tory candidate, before I saw the light and switched to supporting the SNP, essential campaigning pit-stops were any old folks’ homes there happened to be in the constituency.

Usually it was a highpoint of the social calendar in the residents’ otherwise rather monotonous existences. If you showed enough sympathy for their complaints, then you were likely to fortify them in their tendency to vote Tory – especially as you could offer them lifts in big cars to the polling station, so putting one over on every other party.

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Imagine the future under Patel. Without foreign staff in nursing homes, frail pensioners will fail to get the care they need. They will complain if they see a Tory candidate, and I forecast there will be hundreds of candidates telling the Prime Minister to get his, or her, finger out.

When that happens, I forecast further that the unskilled carers will miraculously transition into skilled bedpan executives, welcomed to the UK with open arms. Patel will have failed.

The fact is that the rate of change in the labour market is speeding up rather than slowing down, rendering the distinction between skilled and unskilled flexible to say the least, and probably no longer definable. The rate of change will accelerate for the rest of the 21st century and beyond. Jobs which once seemed secure and well-paid will turn insecure and badly paid. My own profession of journalism has been an early case in point.

Up to now, the seamless supply chains and markets of the growing and integrating EU market have smoothed this roller-coaster ride. That is why the UK has seen heavy immigration: we have come to rely on the skills and flexibility afforded by the vast European labour pool. We will all suffer as it dries up.