With all these new dogs and fences, it seems David Cameron is fox-hunting for Calais migrants

As the migrant crisis in Calais worsens, David Cameron has said he will send more dogs and fencing to deal with the problem. In doing so, is it possible he’s trying to kill two birds with the same stone, or perhaps I should say, rip apart two foxes with the same pack of slathering hounds?

Because it almost sounds like the prime minister has decided to solve the migrant problem AND reintroduce fox-hunting at the same time. It’s all about controlling population levels, after all. And it would avoid all the tedious rigmarole of repealing the fox-hunting law in parliament – just send them all to Calais to hunt migrants instead.

Clearly the call for more dogs and fences is the first stage in this fiendishly clever plan dreamt up by the government’s fiendish-and-clever-sounding Cobra committee. The next stage, I imagine, will to be to round up all the old fox hunters, tell them to dust down their red coats, polish their helmets, groom their horses and maybe daub some warm animal blood on each other’s buttocks, or whatever it is they do to get themselves in the mood.

Next stop: Calais. Perhaps the plan will work something like this – the fox-hunters will organise themselves into groups, possibly along family ties (plenty of those), City of London livery guild membership or Masonic initiation levels. Once all the secret handshaking has been done, each group will be given an area as their hunting ground, then it’s ‘Tally ho!’, release the hounds and last one to catch a foreigner’s a sissy.

Of course they wouldn’t want to make it too hard on the migrants; after all, we’re the country that invented fair play. Perhaps they’ll give the migrants a mile head start, supply them with some Red Bull and a basic French phrase book and point them in the vague direction of the nearest refugee detention centre. If they get to the centre first, well done to them. An unspecified amount of time waiting around to be deported in unsanitary, prison-like conditions will be their reward. If they are unlucky and the fox-hunters catch them, well, it’s only what happens in nature. I just wouldn’t take too close a look.

The fences, I imagine, will be used to keep the hounds on the trail line. After all, you wouldn’t want them wandering off track and hunting other foreigners, such as local French people. That might impact on something that matters, after all, like the economy. Fences will also stop the migrants from accessing the roads and hopping onto lorries – a dashed unfair move!

If a migrant happens to ‘go to ground’ by getting a job, for example, and helping out a local business, more specialised dogs could be sent in to flush them out – bulldogs, perhaps, with Union Jack coats and specialist skinhead handlers. All in the same of good sporting fun, of course.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. If this is the plan, let’s see how the first stage works out. Cameron and his Cobra committee have clearly decided this is not a humanitarian crisis involving real people but purely a numbers problem, one which can only be tackled by throwing bigger numbers at it: bigger numbers of dogs, bigger numbers of fences.

The use of fox-hunting could be seen as the next logical step – one taken from the world of pest control, which is in perfect keeping with the Rentokil rhetoric used by Cameron when he referred to the migrants in Calais as a ‘swarm’. Let’s see if the old dogs and fences effort works. If not, there are plenty of similar solutions they could tweak for the same purpose in the future – badger-culling perhaps?