The Jersey gunboats are awfully convenient for Boris Johnson – but not even he would start a war for votes

The prime minister must have been delighted with the headlines on polling day, writes John Rentoul

French fishing boats protesting outside St Helier (AFP via Getty Images)

What better headlines on election day than “Boris sends gunboats”, in the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Mirror. A bit of anti-French patriotism might go down particularly well in Hartlepool, where legend has it that a monkey that survived a shipwreck during the Napoleonic wars was hanged as a French spy.

It won’t be long before conspiracy theorists suggest that the prime minister engineered the showdown with French fishing boats in Channel Islands waters in order to provide a suitably nationalist backdrop to his biggest electoral test since the general election.

That does not take into account the diplomatic skill of Annick Girardin, the French minister of the sea, who responded to a dispute about fishing rights by threatening to cut off Jersey’s electricity supply: “I would remind you, for example, of the transport of electricity via submarine cables. So we have the means, and even though I’m sorry it has come to this, we will do so if we have to.”