“The Horror! the Horror!”

Ron Liddle took one of those DNA tests and was startled by its findings.

I did not enjoy the Christmas festivities this year: I sang no carols, ate no turkey and failed to watch It’s a Wonderful Life. There were two reasons. First, I received my DNA heritage results from a company I’d bunged £100 or so back in the autumn. My family had been greatly looking forward to this event, hoping for a revelation that I was part Igbo or Hausa or, better still, related somehow to the unfriendly pygmies of the western mountains in Papua New Guinea. Meanwhile I was hoping to be 90 per cent English with the remaining 10 per cent Danish, as I have often considered myself to be distantly related to the Viking hero Ragnar Lodbrok, which may account for my political disposition.

I have often considered myself to be distantly related to the Viking hero Ragnar Lodbrok

So I tapped on the screen with high expectations, family gathered around, and could not have been more appalled if it had been revealed that I was descended from Belgians. I got my wish for some Danish and/or Swedish lineage – about 3 per cent, it said. And there was some English in me too – 20 per cent. The rest, more than three-quarters, was… Scottish. I am almost entirely Scottish. The family howled with mirth while I sat there, checking and re-checking that I hadn’t typed in the wrong name or something, utterly devastated. Hell, I knew there was some Scottish blood on my mother’s side – 87 per cent, as it turned out – but surely not from my dad, whose entire family had lived in County Durham for generations. Yup, Dad was 65 per cent Scottish too.

Imagine how this feels! One moment you are comfortable with the notion of yourself as a decent, solid, industrious Englishman – and then it is revealed that you are, instead, a chippy, grasping, salad-dodging smackhead who is unable to define the term ‘woman’. It is like suddenly finding out, at the age of 62, that you were adopted and your real parents were serial killers. I suppose it explains why, during a hot summer, I totally fail to tan but instead resemble the victim of acute radiation poisoning, suffering cracked and flayed skin, bleeding gums and hair loss. Such a shattering blow to one’s self-esteem and self-worth. The only consolation is that henceforth I shall expect everybody else in England to subsidise me through their taxes, while simultaneously demanding total independence from them.

RTWT