Sooner or later, the penny is going to drop. When Labour realises that it cannot physically remove the Chagossians who have returned to the archipelago – quite apart from the legal obstacles, it will be politically impossible for a second Labour government to drag them from their ancestral lands – it will see that there is only one alternative. If it wants to secure British sovereignty over the islands, and so guarantee the base, it will ditch any notion of evacuating the population, turn 180 degrees and facilitate the resettlement of any Chagossians who want to return. It won’t be cheap. Putting in the infrastructure – electricity generation, a clinic, a primary school, a regular link to the Maldives – would, according to a KPMG report, cost a minimum of £800 million. Still, that is a tiny fraction of the £34 billion that Labour was planning to give to Mauritius. Peopling the outer atolls is both morally right and politically sensible. The way to stave off hostile rulings from Third Worldist judges is to uphold the right to self-determination of an inhabited territory.