If the case were not so serious, Joanna Lumley might have called the verdict absolutely fabulous. Instead, she said: “It gives our country the chance to right a great wrong and to wipe out a national shame.”

The wrong was the ban on former Gurkhas (whose British officers included Ms Lumley's father) settling in Britain if they had retired before 1997. The shame was the spectacle of five of them, and the widow of another, fighting the legal system to overturn the ban, having fought for Britain in real battles from the Falklands to the Gulf. Gurkhas are Nepali citizens. For Britain, in 2008, to employ Nepali citizens to fight and sometimes die in its Armed Forces is a proud legacy of the two countries' shared history, but also a peculiar one. No other Western power does anything quite like it. For these soldiers to be denied the right to live in Britain on retirement was simply unjust. The High Court acknowledged this yesterday. Not only that, Mr Justice Blake said Britons owed them a “moral debt of honour”.

The contrast with the court's treatment of British Forces interpreters in Iraq could not be more stark. Like the Gurkhas, the interpreters worked for the Crown, expecting to be able to live at peace in their own country afterwards. Unlike the Gurkhas, the Iraqis became targets in their homes because of their British association. Some have now been resettled in the UK - but not those murdered by insurgents, or those who served before 2005. The cut-off date was upheld by the court last month, but it is meaningless, not least because the Iraq war began in 2003. It deserves the Gurkha treatment.