When a prominent left-wing celebrity wants to attack a conservative person or policy they very often make a comparison with Hitler’s Germany or his Nazi party.

The latest person to draw this invidious, ignorant and downright offensive parallel with the gold standard of political evil is the former footballer turned Match of the Day BBC commentator Gary Lineker.

Presumably, the star has calculated that his fame and popularity with football fans make him unsackable

In Tweets attacking the government’s new Bill attempting to crack down on illegal migrants crossing the Channel, Lineker said that it was an ‘immeasurably cruel’ policy that was ‘beyond awful’ and that it used language directed at the migrants ‘not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’.

His comments drew an angry reaction from Tory MPs, who called on the corporation to button Lineker’s notoriously loose lips.

Lineker, whose £1.35 million annual salary is the highest paid by the corporation to any employee, has a track record of making over the top anti-Tory political remarks – he specialises in attacking Brexit – and was found to have breached the BBC’s impartiality rules in October.

Presumably, however, the star has calculated that his fame and popularity with football fans make him unsackable, and that he can get away with making political attacks with impunity and without risking his well-paid BBC career.

In reaching for the tired and lazy Nazi parallel however, Lineker may have gone a Tweet too far – even for him. Though the Corporation are indeed unlikely to go beyond the slap on the wrist of an official rebuke, his own reputation will not exactly be enhanced by such a ridiculous remark.

Let us spell out what happened in Germany in the 1930s to see whether Lineker’s comment bears any sort of relationship with reality. In 1933 in the midst of a deep economic and political crisis Adolf Hitler came to power at the head of a mass movement openly preaching racial hatred against Jews and using savage violence against them and others.

Once in power, the Nazis abolished democracy and elections and set about a systematic persecution of their enemies – imprisoning them without charge or trial in concentration camps like Dachau where they were beaten, brutalised and often killed.

Jews were progressively stripped of all rights – including the right to marry or have sex with non-Jews – and had their businesses and property burned, trashed and confiscated as the regime embarked on a rearmament and conquest programme that plunged Europe into war in 1939. During the course of the conflict, in an effort to exterminate European Jewry known as the Holocaust, some six million people were murdered by the Nazis in gas chambers in death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau or by mass shootings.

Here in Britain, in reacting to growing public outrage over the waves of cross-Channel migration organised by criminal gangs of people traffickers, the government is scrupulously if belatedly carrying out a policy supported by the majority of the British public – though obviously not by bien pensants like Lineker.

Can anyone – even a historical ignoramus – seriously pretend that the measure unveiled yesterday by the Prime Minister and Home Secretary, themselves both the children of immigrants to Britain, bears any sort of comparison to the hateful words and vile crimes of Hitler’s Nazis? The idea is wholly absurd, and Lineker should stick to commenting on football – a subject that at least he actually knows something about.