In fact, the wearily familiar outline of the agreement – yet more UK taxpayers’ money going to the French in return for more beach police patrols, better information-sharing, embedded UK officers working alongside them, blah blah blah – fits very neatly into the failed approach of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel.
Clearly having what Home Secretary Suella Braverman heralded as a ’40 per cent uplift in the number of French gendarmes patrolling the French beaches’ has the potential to reduce the cross-Channel traffic at the margins, and for a while.
So long as the French honour their side of things, some migrants who would have been able to set off will be caught on beaches, have their dinghies burst and need to try their luck again a few days later. Which, of course, they will.
Were you to hold out the prospect of this year’s completely outrageous number of more than 40,000 illegal migrants crossing the Channel falling back in 2023 to last year’s shockingly unacceptable 28,000, no doubt Ms Braverman would rebuke you.
It is easy to see what is in it for France – apart from another £63 million of British largesse. By becoming the primary volume control mechanism on illegal immigration into the UK, president Macron is gaining huge political leverage over Rishi Sunak.