Why would France help Britain stop the boats?

It is nearly a year since Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron agreed their ‘ground-breaking’ deal to stop the small boats crisis in the Channel. Dubbed the ‘one in, one out’ agreement, the scheme was hailed as a triumph by the Prime Minister, and by some of his cheerleaders in the media. ‘A small boats deal with France would be a game-changer for Starmer – and the country,’ proclaimed an editorial in the Independent. There were one or two more cynical takes on the deal, most of them found in these pages. As I wrote last year: ‘This latest plan to...