Lord Tebbit may have reached his nadir (or zenith depending on which side if the argument you fall) by suggesting that EU migrants attempting to enter Britain should be asked on which side their grandparents fought during the Second World War.
In an update to his infamous cricket test (in 1990 Tebbit suggested testing the loyalty of Britain’s ethnic minorities by asking them which international cricket team they supported), the former Tory Party chairman told Newsnight that the modern equivalent was to ask EU migrants who their forefathers fought for in World War II.
He said: "Well one test I would use is to ask them on which side their fathers or grandfathers or whatever fought in the Second World War. And so you'll find that the Poles and the Czechs and the Slovaks were all on the right side. And so that's a pretty good test isn’t it? Perhaps we'll even manage to teach them to play cricket over the years."
Tebbit's suggestion was not the first invocation of the European conflict during the current EU immigration debate. Earlier on Friday, David Cameron took a stiff Twitter jab to the chin after the Czech Republic's Europe Minister responded to the PM’s speech by posting a picture of Czech pilots serving in the RAF during the Second World War.
Tomas Prouza posted the picture having been upset by Cameron’s suggestion that EU immigrants should only be allowed to claim welfare after they had been in the UK for four years. He responded by posting the following tweet, with the words: "These Czechs 'worked' in the #UK for less than four years. No benefits for them?"
This followed an earlier Tweet by Prouza in which he said: "Cameron's speech on migration: taxing people according to their nationality? What other criteria will come next?"
Prouza’s sentiments were echoed in Warsaw, with the Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz releasing a statement that read: "Poland will not agree to changes undermining the principles of the EU's single market, specifically the free movement of people."