In the cafés of Calais, the croissants are flakier, the wine flows freer, and the local police sergeant now drives to work in a cherry-red Ferrari. Not bad for a man on a simple civil servant’s wage. His colleagues, once faithful to their battered Peugeots and Citroëns, now cruise in Porsches and Lamborghinis, their sirens drowned out by the growl of German V12 engineering. Maybe, this is all linked to those pesky rubber boats crossing the Channel, or maybe not? …nous présumons.
The explanation, whispered over espressos and Gauloises, is not some miracle pay rise from Paris. No, it is the rubber boat bonanza — the single most profitable Franco-British enterprise since the smuggling of brandy and silk in the 18th century.
Officially, France is the diligent partner in stopping desperate migrants from crossing the Channel (ha, ha). For this, London has stupidly sent over £800 million odd in goodwill payments, naively trusting that la patrie would keep its end of the bargain. The French, of course, obliged and continued to do nothing, instead laughing at the idiotic Rosbifs.
“Qui est that fucking idiot de Premier Ministre Britannique? Ah oui, Keir Starmer. Il nous a payé des millions pour ‘smashing les gangs’. On a pris l’argent. Maintenant, je ‘smash’ ma maîtresse dans ma nouvelle Mercedes-Maybach Classe S. Ces Anglais sont des imbéciles naïfs.”
Unofficially, the French coast is now the new Silicon Valley of human trafficking, and the gendarmes are the venture capitalists.
Every dinghy that slides into the waves is, it seems, blessed twice: once by the traffickers, who hand out thick brown envelopes, and once again by the British Treasury, which dutifully wires another tranche of taxpayer money across the Channel. “We are fighting the crossings very hard,” insists one French official while polishing his Rolex. “But the smugglers. Mon dieu! They are so clever. Sometimes we can only stand back and admire their… entrepreneurship.”
Meanwhile, the small towns of northern France have become strangely prosperous. Policemen’s wives are seen shopping in Chanel boutiques; mayors suddenly fund marble fountains in villages of 600 souls; and the local boulangerie now offers caviar croissants.
The clueless British, of course, remain baffled. Every year they announce “bold new cooperation” and every year the boats increase.
Some whisper that the French have perfected a system of double-dipping: play the guardian to Westminster while moonlighting as the banker for the smugglers. This is why escorting the precious cargo of economic migrants stuffed into those rubber boats onto the UK is so very important, and the French Navy are diligently safeguarding a very, very important money-making scheme bringing vast amounts of riches to many people — except the stupid English Rosbifs, eh!
Asked about the sight of a captain of police revving his Lamborghini Aventador in one of the arrondissements, one local spokesman smiled thinly: “It is important to reward excellence.”
The overloaded rubber boats will keep on coming from France. It’s not rocket science, there’s too much money to be made.
