The attorney general, Baroness Scotland, is in hot water for allegedly employing an illegal immigrant as a cleaner in her west London home.

Downing Street says that is has ‘full confidence’ in Baroness Scotland, although you do wonder whether she similarly had full confidence that her cleaner was not an illegal immigrant.

Perhaps the unfortunate aspect of the story is that at least Ms Loloahi Tapui was paying tax and NICs as a cleaner, whereas her future income might be as a recipient of, rather than a contributor to, one of the 51 state benefits that the country’s income tax receipts now go to pay.

I did also wonder whether Baroness Scotland had considered the employment status of Ms Tapui when she started work.

The Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006, s 25(b) states that ‘a reference to employment is to employment under a contract of service...’.

Presumably Ms Tapui was not self-employed.

Anyway, employment status aside, good news has arrived and the Baroness might be interested in an article in HMRC’s latest Pulse magazine, which has just landed in my kennel.

Apparently, workers in HMRC’s benefits and credits department have had problems identifying fraudulent documents:

‘Lots of people came forward saying they didn’t know whether some documents such as passports, birth certificates, ID cards, drivers’ licences and National Insurance cards were counterfeit or not’.

HMRC sprang into action and created a team ‘to do something about it’.

This ‘something’ is a learning package from which staff can ‘get to look at and feel genuine and fake documents and learn how to examine different security features’.

I’m thinking that the Baroness might want to make an official visit to the department in the near future.

We dogs have the same problem of course, and as one with a rather, ahem, mixed alien parentage my own right of abode here has occasionally been questioned down in the park.

Usually, I find that a sharp bite in the back of the questioner’s neck puts them right, but this doesn’t always work.

Ultimately, exact and irrefutable evidence can be provided if required. If it’s good enough for dogs why not people, so I suggest that, like me, everyone has a microchip inserted in the back of their neck. Form an orderly queue behind Baroness Scotland.

A word to the wise, though: don’t ask to look at the size of the needle they use to do this.

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