Robert Jenrick accuses French police of ignoring migrants in Calais

Telegraph

3 days ago

Robert Jenrick has accused French police of failing to act after he reported dozens of migrants with life jackets who were preparing to cross the Channel.
The shadow justice secretary contacted the authorities after spotting a group of about 50 people holding life jackets at a bus stop near Calais.
But Mr Jenrick was told by an emergency call operator that they 'do not think that [the police] would come', and no officer ever turned up.
The Tory frontbencher was also forced to cut short his visit to Loon-Plage migrant camp - located between Calais and Dunkirk - when a man 'started throwing glass bottles' that only narrowly missed him.
A total of 474 people crossed the Channel in eight small boats on Monday, as the illegal migration crisis continues to worsen under Sir Keir Starmer's Labour Government.
In a video shared by Mr Jenrick, he could be seen spotting a group of '60 or 70 migrants holding life jackets' at about 8.30pm on Sunday.
The group was gathered at a bus stop with no sign of the French police and eventually boarded a bus despite not having any tickets.
Mr Jenrick and his team then followed the bus to Dunkirk, saying: 'We think they're in a little passageway behind these houses. The beach is just there.'
There was no sign of the group by just after 4am in the morning, suggesting they had boarded a small boat and attempted to cross the Channel.
'At daybreak, we find the migrants have gone,' Mr Jenrick said in the clip. 'We don't know where. There's still no sign of any police. So I ring them.'
During his phone call to the police, Mr Jenrick said: 'I'm in Dunkirk and I saw a large group of maybe 40 or 50 illegal migrants in the cemetery off the main road by the beach.'
A female call operator responded: 'He does not think that they're going to come, but he's going to give the information to the police, then the police will decide.'
Mr Jenrick then confirmed no police officers arrived despite the three-year Anglo-French deal, first agreed in March 2023, to double the number of French officers on beaches.
He said: 'We've given £800 million to France and we didn't see a police officer the whole day, and now we just phoned them and it doesn't sound like they'll even bother to come out.'
Elsewhere in the video, Mr Jenrick said Britons were 'told that these are refugees' in small boats, but that differed from his experience at the migrant camps.
When he asked one man if he thought he was going to be able to live in London if he crossed the Channel, the man nodded his head.
A second migrant who Mr Jenrick spoke to said he was not worried about getting on a small boat and making the dangerous journey across the Channel.
In an article for The Telegraph, Mr Jenrick said: 'What I saw in the camps, in the streets and on the beaches was sickening.
'I've been following this for years now, but the reality today is the worst I've ever seen it. The whole racket is a disgrace and the French are aiding and abetting it.'
Reflecting on his efforts to ensure a police response to the group of would-be Channel migrants, Mr Jenrick said: 'Before daybreak, it became clear the migrants had departed. Their detritus was scattered around. So we hurried to the beach.
'The migrants were either on their way here, had moved to another beach or perhaps today's journey had been called off for some unknowable reason. This wasn't journalism to me or an academic exercise.
'I want to 'stop the boats' – that's why I resigned from the last government – and a launch was now likely imminently. I called the French police, but they were dismissive of me reporting it. Nobody was deployed.'
Mr Jenrick said cooperation between the British and French governments on the issue amounted to 'utter farce' on the part of the French response and 'naivety' from Sir Keir.
He also claimed that he had to flee the migrant camp after a migrant attacked him with glass bottles, one of which only narrowly missed his head.
'Many were polite to me, although some threatened me with violence,' Mr Jenrick wrote.
'One, a gangster-like character, told me to leave, pressing himself up close to me in an attempt to intimidate me.
'Another made it clear my time in the camp was up and started throwing glass bottles at me. One hit the ground beside me, another skimmed past my head. I was forced to leave hastily.'
Earlier in the week, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said he had a knife pulled on him during a visit to a migrant camp near Calais.
The shadow cabinet ministers' visits to the camps by the French port city came after the number of small boat crossings under the Labour Government passed 50,000 this week.
The site of the original Calais 'jungle' camp was dismantled almost a decade ago, in October 2016, at the height of the European migrant crisis prompted by the civil war in Syria.
But new camps, likened to the original, are also home to thousands of migrants, with record numbers of people successfully making the journey from France to the UK in small boats.