Do you wish Joanna Lumley was on your side?

I support the Gurkhas' victory against Gordon Brown and their winning the right to settle in Britain, but I can't accept the role Joanna Lumley has been given as their political spokesman and leader.

After campaigning for years, the Gurkhas appear to have snatched the prize from a crisis-ridden government by the masterful, strategic use of a comedy actor.

Lumley was magnificent: bellowing the war-cry in her beautiful posh accent; accosting ministers with irreproachable manners; and glamorously forcing the Prime Minister to back down. 

Brown's series of unfortunate events and his disastrous responses have been established as the political top story and easy narrative that pretends to explain everything as it happens. 

Lumley is supposed to have taken advantage of the situation and manipulated events to raise awareness of, and public sympathy for, the Gurkhas' cause.

Brown is supposed to have caved in under pressure from this public opinion, but the significant section of his Parliamentary party that did not back him was his more practical problem.

The public was not really involved in the Gurkhas' victory, however much the public may have supported the old soldiers.

The affair was enacted by its principle players, Lumley and the elderly Gurkhas, in the arranged gaze of the media and in scenes created for the media. Perhaps anticipating how the public perceived these performances, a number of Labour MPs dissented from the government's line.

Joanna Lumley raised awareness of the plight of the Gurkhas and starred in the media portrayal of that plight. She went on to improvise by buttonholing a minister in the street.

But the public functioned as a passive receiver of the campaign, as it had of the top story of the decline of Brown's administration. Those MPs of all parties who voted with the Gurkhas are under pressure from public opinion only as it will be expressed next year in the General Election. There was no public involvement in any of the events that led to the Gurkhas' demands being met.

Furthermore, the issues discussed were narrowed the more that the government backed down. 

Having originally objected to settling more Gurkhas in Britain on the bases of cost and the numbers of other claimants who might come forward, the government retreated by making the Gurkhas a special case, deserving of rights that accrue to them alone on the basis of their particular status as faithful colonial retainers.

I support the extension of rights to live in work in Britain because it is immoral and irrational to distinguish between people on the basis of their appearance or origins and because immigration has been very good for Britain and made it a better place - let 'em all in!

Joanna Lumley, 'daughter of the regiment', closed the discussion down to concentrate on the particular merits of British settlement for Gurkhas. That they had fought (fought?)  For Britain and therefore had the moral right to live here was the winning, morally undeniable coup de grace to Brown's resistance.

So while it's good that Gurkhas have settlement rights, those rights have been won in such a peculiar way that it will make campaigning against those immigration controls that had previously denied the Gurkhas' rights even more difficult.

If Joanna Lumley was on your side you could certainly expect cameras and media attention. You might hope to create public debate and support from the publicity. 

However, nothing like that happened with the Gurkhas. Their story and the merits of their claims became a dramatised example of a lame duck administration.

Perhaps your cause is one that can afford to be dislocated from wider issues where, as long as your particular demands are met, you will happily narrow the debate around it to a simple moral imperative. 

If you don't want to challenge the assumptions that have been the basis of resistance to your cause so far, then you do need Joanna Lumley on your side.

Perhaps celebrity involvement in campaigns may become more common now, but most things worth campaigning for involve the kinds of discussions that change people's minds or opinions.

Would you ask Joanna Lumley to speak for your cause on the basis of her expertise in the arguments and rhetoric of the issues involved?