When it comes to migrant Channel crossings, Priti Patel cannot win

The home secretary is spending substantial sums of taxpayers’ money on something that cannot be delivered, writes Sean O’Grady

Migrants are brought ashore from the local lifeboat at Dungeness in Kent, after being picked up following a small boat incident in the Channel on 6 September 2021 (PA)

Under intense political pressure at home, not least from her hard-right political base, the home secretary Priti Patel met her French counterpart, Gerald Darmanin, to try and persuade the French authorities, in her view, to do more to stop the flow of migrants across the English Channel and honour their side of a bargain that has cost the UK taxpayer well over £100m in recent years.

She is on a hiding to nothing. First, like a modern-day Queen Cnut, she can no more to prevent the refugees and migrants fleeing across the channel than she can stop the tide coming in.

Nor, more to the point, can the French do much about it, for the same reason – the numbers arriving are too large to control, they are too determined to make the attempt to change the course of their lives, it is too profitable a trade for the criminal gangs running the trafficking, and the weather, geography and international law (the obligation to grant asylum) favour the people in the dinghies.