No Frenchman has been as critical as the recent ‘one in, one out’ migrant deal than Xavier Bertrand. A grandee of the centre-right Republican party (and also the president of the Upper France region), Bertrand has denounced the treaty as ‘bad’ for France.

He added that the small boats crisis is ‘the fault of the English’ because the migrants ‘know they’ll end up getting work there’. The only way to end the Channel migrant crisis, says Bertrand, is for the British government to ‘put an end [to] illegal labour immigration’.

Bertrand has been banging this drum for a decade. In the summer of 2015, he wrote to David Cameron, then the prime minister, about the 3,000 migrants massed on the French coast, most of whom were young men from Afghanistan, Sudan and Eritrea. ‘Let’s put an end to the hy

See Full Page