It is in Boris Johnson’s own interest to get a grip on the Channel crossings

To step back a moment from the awful human story of young lives lost in the cold waters of the Channel, one of the puzzles of the tragedy is how much it was in the interests of Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and the entire Conservative Party to get to grips with the problem of small-boat crossings.

As we report today, they were warned. Ms Patel was even, as a backbench MP, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, which warned two years ago that the government’s policy could have “the counterproductive effect of forcing migrants to make desperate journeys across the Channel”.

Even if she did not listen to herself, she should have listened to her officials in the Home Office after she was appointed home secretary in July 2019, who explained to her how difficult it was lawfully to prevent small boats from making the dangerous crossing. Any competent politician should have heard the alarm bells going off at that point.

If Ms Patel was not prompted to act by compassion, it might have been expected that she would be motivated by the desire to protect her own reputation and that of her government. The people had voted to “Take Back Control”, and yet here was a situation in which the government seemed unable to do so. The prime minister had appointed her to one of the highest offices partly because of her reputation, both within the Conservative Party and among voters, as someone who would take a restrictive approach to immigration. Did she not see the danger to herself, never mind to desperate asylum seekers denied legitimate routes of entry?

There is some evidence that she did realise that she had a problem. Reports emerged from the Home Office of ministers and officials considering increasingly implausible schemes – from processing asylum applications offshore, in a series of places that wanted nothing to do with the idea, to installing wave machines along the maritime border between UK and French waters.

Yet there appeared to be no attempt to think deeply about the problem from first principles. If there had been, two things should have become apparent. One is that the problem cannot be solved as such; it can only be managed. Large numbers of people are legitimately trying to escape from terrible situations in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. Many of them hope to come to the UK, because they are familiar with the language or because they have family here, while the rules on family reunion are too restrictive to allow them in.

The second is that the problem can be managed only by cooperation with other countries, and particularly with France. Yet this government seems to have gone out of its way to antagonise the French government, up to and including the president, Emmanuel Macron. It is not for The Independent to adjudicate in this unseemly squabble, although it is likely that Mr Macron has at least one eye on his re-election prospects, and disinviting Ms Patel from Sunday’s meeting in Paris to discuss the problem was petty and unhelpful.

But Mr Johnson and Ms Patel should have realised that their interest lay in being as nice to the French as possible, and in doing everything in their power to try to give the French government incentives to help deal with our problem. Instead, the prime minister sometimes seems to think that he can rally domestic opinion by squaring up to our neighbours. This is a terrible mistake. Yes, there is a strand of xenophobic opinion in the UK that will applaud a war of words with Mr Macron, but it is part of a wider swathe of opinion that is turning on Mr Johnson and Ms Patel because of their inability to stop the boats.

The prime minister and the home secretary need, belatedly, to show some basic competence. They need to work with the French; they need to open up some legal routes to seeking asylum in the UK; and they need to speed up the handling of existing asylum claims. If they will not do it because they care about the desperate people who continue to try to cross the Channel, they should do it in their own self-interest.