The voice was bewitching, the manner beguiling. Joanna Lumley leant forward, looking directly into the eyes of Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs committee, as he asked her if she had tried to meet the Prime Minister over the Gurkha issue.

In a voice that was so husky with hurt we could hear the bruises, Ms Lumley said: “I wrote to the Prime Minister three times — and my letters haven't been acknowledged.” Mr Vaz, who worships celebrity, looked shocked, for he can imagine no circumstance where he would have ignored even a sentence from such a wonderful (and wonderfully famous) creature. “Do you think such a meeting would have been helpful?”

Now it was Ms Lumley’s turn to look shocked. “Yes!” she said with a whoosh of intense breathiness that seemed, like an oriental perfume, replete with meanings: yearning, yes, but also regret and a glancing remembrance of what might have been.

My, but it was a performance. The MPs adored her. It wasn’t so much a hearing as an organised drool. Her demeanour was faultless. As the woman who has just defeated the Government, she could have been triumphant and superior. Instead she was humble and gracious.

She had sat in the audience, surrounded by Gurkhas, throughout the painfully defensive testimony of Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, still trotting out the penny-pinching arguments that lost him the vote last week. “I may be between a rock and a hard place but I’m not stupid!” he said. No one agreed.

Ms Lumley glided to her seat, an elegant silver kukri brooch on the lapel of her black trouser suit. Her voice was calm. Yes, she had been jubilant but now, “to my shock”, she had just heard that the entry-clearance officials in Delhi were still operating on the old rules. “I had understood it was to be discontinued at once,” she said. I yearned for dramatically jerky incidental music.

MPs tried to question her but, what with all the drooling, the questions were rather wet. At one point Ms Lumley said to Patrick Mercer, a Tory MP, who hadn’t been listening to her answer: “I can see from your face, I’m mumbling.” Mr Mercer looked utterly stricken and began to babble, literally babble, about his “mumbling face”.

So what was the next phase of the campaign? “I have been set back slightly,” she noted. “I don’t know what I have to do. We’ve gone to the High Court. We’ve gone to the press. We’ve gone to the people and we’ve gone to Parliament. If that’s not enough, who do we go to? All of those people have backed the Gurkhas but somehow the rules have not yet been changed.”

She was just this side of beseeching. “So who do we go to next? The royal family are not allowed to be included, though I personally had a letter of support.” At the words “royal family” the journalists jumped. This was news! I had a vision of Liz and Phil, watching the Parliament Channel, cheering as Phil waved his kukri.

“I don’t understand democracy,” said Joanna. “If this is not what democracy is.” MPs rushed to her aid, I marvelled at her skill. As someone once would have said: Darling, you were fabulous, absolutely.

Times Recommends

• The Times celebrates its 225th birthday
• Heath discussed IMF loan during 1974 crisis
• Britain’s loneliest café opens for business