Harold Macmillan said that two institutions no sane government should take on were the National Union of Mineworkers and the Brigade of Guards. A modern edition of this prime ministerial advice should now be set out, with those two institutions replaced by Joanna Lumley and the Brigade of Gurkhas.

Lumley certainly qualifies as a national institution, much loved by the entire country (or at least the male half) since 1969, when she appeared in the film Some Girls Do. Lumley remains a great beauty; yet it is her keen intellect that shines through more and more. Above both those gifts she possesses a third attribute, more important still: if one wanted to find the living embodiment of the phrase “good egg”, Lumley is that person.

I appreciate, therefore, that to defend this most unlovely government against Lumley and her latest good cause is to invite ridicule, hatred and contempt – but, still, it must be said: the Gurkhas have done very well out of this administration and have much less to complain about than at any time in their long and honourable history.

Hilary Benn had drawn the short straw, being the designated government spokesman on the BBC’s Question Time last week, required to defend his party’s treatment of the Gurkhas. He pointed out that before 2004 no government had given retired Gurkhas an absolute right to British citizenship and permanent residency – in that year Labour gave such a commitment to all Gurkhas who have served since 1997, when their main base was moved from Hong Kong to this country. While Gurkhas are still paid less than their British comrades, this government has markedly increased their pension payments: a typical Gurkha NCO retiring at 33 after 15 years’ service now receives a pension greater than the salary of a Nepalese government minister.

Yet the studio audience seemed to assume that Benn was making all this up – even the normally calm David Dimbleby became almost apoplectic as Benn tried to articulate the facts of the case. I suppose this is what happens when a government has become discredited: its ministers are disbelieved even when telling the plain truth.

Labour has indeed not acceded to Lumley’s principal request: that all Gurkha veterans and their dependants, from before the 1997 cut-off, are given absolute rights of British residency. It claims that up to 100,000 could move to Britain if it did. Lumley says, persuasively, that if a person has risked his life for this country then he (and his family) should be allowed to live here; the Daily Mail and The Sun have added that Gurkhas are all “heroes” and should be welcomed with open arms.

It’s certainly true that many Gurkhas have been heroes, as we would normally define the term. The government addressed this precise point by offering an unconditional right of citizenship to pre-1997 Gurkhas who have “received level 1-3 awards for gallantry, leadership or bravery for service in the brigade . . . [or] have a chronic/long term medical condition which is attributable to, or was aggravated by, service in the brigade”. This was not enough to satisfy 27 Labour rebels, let alone the massed Tories and Liberal Democrats, who defeated the government in a Commons vote on the matter on Wednesday.

Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, has for some time campaigned on this issue, but Conservative high command has been a very late convert to the cause. While it was characteristically clever of David Cameron to ensure that he, along with Clegg, was pictured dangerously close to the kukri-waving Lumley after the vote, Conservative hypocrisy on this issue is emetic – by the end of their period of office in 1997 only five ex-Gurkhas had been given rights of residency, as against 6,000 under the present government.

It was the Conservatives who took away the right of most residents of Hong Kong to settle in Britain: they refused to change that policy even after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 caused many of us to argue this was potentially inhumane. In 1994 Michael Howard, then home secretary, exempted only individuals who could demonstrate that they had assets of at least £1m – which obviously did not include any of the then Hong-Kong based Gurkhas. In fact Howard made easily the best Commons speech on Wednesday in favour of allowing all the pre-1997 Gurkhas in; he denied hypocrisy, arguing that when he made his dispositions about Hong Kong 15 years ago, the Gurkhas were not British subjects but citizens of Nepal.

That is precisely the government’s point. The 1947 tripartite agreement between Nepal, Britain and India (many more Gurkhas serve in the Indian army than in our own) decreed: “A Gurkha soldier must be recruited as a Nepali citizen, must serve as a Nepali citizen and must be resettled as a Nepali citizen.” You couldn’t get much clearer than that. For all the pathos of the bemedalled old Gurkhas being tearfully embraced by Lumley after the Commons vote, the fact is that these warriors would have understood the deal when they signed up. And a very good deal it was, which explains why year after year almost 20,000 young Nepalese would apply for the 230 new places available in the brigade.

A Nepalese farmer with a son in the Gurkhas recently explained to an American reporter that “to gain acceptance into the brigade is a sign of both prestige and financial success”. No Briton would consider joining the armed forces principally for enrichment – nor would we wish it to be so – but for a family otherwise consigned to the desperately insecure life of subsistence hill-farming in one of the world’s poorest countries, a guaranteed salary followed by a British Army pension at the age of 33 is a golden opportunity. Yes, we exploited these harsh facts for our own military advantage; but what was the harm done to the Nepalese recruits?

Yesterday I called Lord Bramall, who had been an officer in a Gurkha regiment and, as chief of the defence staff in 1982, overrode political objections to insist the Gurkhas play a role in the Falklands campaign. Bramall says he “loves” the Gurkhas, but in his gruff military manner he is deeply unimpressed by the campaign to put them on “all fours” with British-born soldiers: “One of the points of the arrangement was that they were cheaper to employ, as well as being outstanding soldiers. Given that they tend to have bigger families than British soldiers – think of married quarters – they are soon going to be more expensive to employ. So this militant human rights campaign for the older Gurkhas could kill the golden goose for later generations: remember, all this must come out of the defence budget.”

Bramall went on to use the “m” word that nobody dared mention in the Commons debate: he cheerfully acknowledged that his former colleagues were “mercenary soldiers – in the nicest possible way”, adding that “they fought admirably in the Falklands, as I knew they would: but I don’t think that any of them were motivated by the idea of keeping the Falklands British”.

Bramall cleared up one final point: apparently the blood-curdling cry that Lumley emitted while sandwiched between Cameron and Clegg – “Ayo Gorkhali!” – means, “The Gurkhas are coming!” That, of course, is exactly what has been worrying Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, who has been confounded by the way the most reliably antiimmigration tabloid papers have campaigned for carte-blanche admission of Gurkha families. They have argued, along with almost everybody else, that we would be much happier with these Nepalese families here than with would-be jihadists who are already here and either in prison or under surveillance. So we would; but so what?

dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk

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