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

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.

The French deputy for Calais, Pierre-Henri Dumont, who is familiar with the scene, has explained that is impossible for the French police to patrol the long coastline: “The fact is, we've got 300 to 400 kilometres of shore to monitor every day and every night and it's quite impossible to have police officers every 100 metres because of the length of the shore.

“We have more and more patrols … The money that was promised to be given by the UK government to France is set to maintain this number of patrols that we already doubled a few weeks ago.”

Ms Patel, in other words, is spending substantial sums of taxpayers’ money on something that cannot be delivered, by the French or anyone else, without any specific targets for success, and which is behind her ability to enforce. Hence some veiled, and futile, threats to withhold payments.

So much, then for taking back control of Britain’s borders and stopping migration.

Politically, Ms Patel cannot win, because however much she and the French reduce the numbers travelling it will always be too much for the likes of the dinghy-hunter general, Nigel Farage, and those in the press and politics who agree with him. Gradually, she may be pushed (possibly quite willingly) towards a more aggressive approach on the high seas, authorising Border Force and royal navy vessels to force the boats to turn back – though that is questionable under international maritime law for those in unseaworthy craft, or threatening to capsize themselves.

The demands though for the kind of tactics used by the royal Australian navy in pushing migrants back will grow from her own side and parts of the media. The Conservative MP for Ashfield, Lee Anderson, for example, suggests violating sovereign French waters: “We should drop these illegal immigrants, not migrants, off on a French beach and send the French government a bill for the cost of the journey.”

Whatever else, and as we see with the debate about allowing more foreign and EU workers back in to relieve labour shortages, Brexit has not settled the immigration issue once and for all; far from it.