As Suella Braverman exchanged pecks on the cheek and signed a £63m deal for new migrant patrols with her French counterpart, Gérald Darmanin, the home secretary looked like a woman who means business.
That was, after all, the point of the exercise. The optics of today’s Anglo-French agreement were designed to calm anti-migrant voters who eye the increase in small boat arrivals with dismay and insist that “Britain is full”. There have been carefully orchestrated sprinklings of rhetoric to go with it. In an article in the Sunday Telegraph, the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, pledged to end “Hotel Britain”, accusing “economic migrants” of “asylum shopping” in the UK; Rishi Sunak told reporters while on his way to the G20 summit in Indonesia that “the absolute priority that the British people have right now, as do I, is to grip illegal migration”.
