The French ARE to blame for the chaos in Calais and we can't trust them to do any more than give a Gallic shrug, writes historian ANDREW ROBERTS 

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When I die,’ Mary Tudor is reported to have said just before she expired in 1558, ‘you will find the word “Calais” engraved on my heart.’ 

As her reputation for political competence expires, Home Secretary Theresa May ought to be saying the same thing.

As the emergency committee Cobra sits in seeming permanent session to examine the options facing the British Government to stem the kamikaze-style attacks on our lorries by illegal migrants in Calais, Mrs May is looking increasingly hapless.

With holes in the Channel Tunnel’s protective fencing so old and impressive they almost qualify for Grade II listed status, her management of the migrant crisis has been woeful. 

A group of migrants make their way through a gap in the fence at the Eurotunnel site in Calais as they seek to board UK-bound freight trains

Yet not a word escapes from Cobra about the one aspect of the crisis everyone knows to be true but few publicly state: the French authorities are still part of the problem, not the solution.

French police are the toughest in Europe. Watch them go into action in Parisian riots and you can see why they have the fearsome reputation they do, cracking heads with gusto. 

Their willingness to cut corners and use brute force might be rather exaggerated by popular French TV dramas such as Braquo and Spiral, but only slightly.

Yet in Calais the French police have for weeks now simply been looking the other way as the migrants mount their nightly assaults on the British freight haulage industry, and the French state is adamantly refusing to deport migrants back to their countries of origin.

When one adds that to the utterly disgraceful behaviour of Disneyland Paris in secretly ripping off British customers in order to subsidise French guests, the French government’s demand that Waterloo’s Lion’s Mound be removed from €2 coins, and François Hollande’s refusal to make meaningful proposals to remodel the EU prior to Britain’s in-out referendum, one is reminded that our relations with our ‘sweet enemy’ must always be slightly fraught.

French President Francois Hollande, whose high tax rates have chased a great deal of French talent and capital to move abroad

Boris Johnson likes to trumpet the fact that London is the sixth-largest French city, with more French inhabitants living there than in Lille. The reason, of course, is Hollande’s ludicrous tax rates, which at one point reached 75 per cent. 

Hollande’s entirely self-defeating war against France’s high-earners and high-achievers – which are likely to be copied by Labour should Jeremy Corbyn become leader – has led to the greatest flight of talent and capital from Paris since the Germans marched down the Champs-Élysées in June 1940.

It is no coincidence that while in the English-speaking world massive companies such as Apple, Google, Virgin, Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook have been constantly springing up from scratch, in the past half-century there has not been a single French equivalent.

The Champs-Élysées analogy reminds us that there has not been a truly great French leader since Charles de Gaulle. While we were able to produce men and women of the calibre of Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, Margaret Thatcher and (love him or hate him) Tony Blair, the French political system has produced a succession of minnows and midgets.

The reason is in part the absurd constitution of the Fifth Republic, which in 2017 is likely to see Hollande re-elected despite his massive unpopularity, simply because he will be standing against the neo-fascist Front National.

Although David Cameron has diplomatically attempted to deflect criticism from the French during the latest migrant crisis, it is not hard to detect what he really thinks about it all. 

He cannot criticise them directly, otherwise they might simply move the border controls from French soil back across the Channel to Britain. But one day there might be an argument for our doing just that anyway, unless this present crisis is dealt with in a firmer way than Mrs May is presently offering.

Striking employees of the My Ferry Link company block access to the harbour with a flaming wall of tyres on Saturday

Yet even Cameron’s perfectly reasonable use of the word ‘swarm’ to describe the migrant would-be invasion – there are more than 3,000 of them in Calais today – has been criticised by the usual array of NGOs and the hirelings of the massive human-rights industry in this country.

The result is that today it is quicker to fly to Miami for your summer holiday than to get to Paris by car. Striking ferry workers – who never miss the opportunity for wildcat action in order to maximise the misery of holidaymakers – are throwing lorry tyres into makeshift barricades and setting them alight, as the French police give their Gallic shrugs.

Ten years ago, a fascinating book called That Sweet Enemy was published by the historians Robert and Isabelle Tombs, chronicling Anglo-French relations from Louis XIV up to 2005. 

France has not produced a great leader since Charles de Gaulle, argues Andrew Roberts

It argued that France and Britain were almost indistinguishable as modern major powers, and pointed out how a Martian stepping from his spacecraft would scarcely be able to distinguish between the two countries of 60.5 million people (Britain) and 60.4 million (France), with GDPs of $1.927 trillion (Britain) and $1.911 trillion (France), and where life expectancy is almost the same.

In terms of the numbers of murders and cigarettes smoked per capita, Olympic gold medals won since 1896, and the amount of foreign aid given, France and Britain ranked alongside each other in international tables. They even came 22nd (Britain) and 23rd (France) in the 2005 Eurovision Song Contest.

Ten years later these statistics haven’t changed hugely – our GDP is now at $2.94 trillion versus France’s $2.84 trillion – but the soul and spirit of the two countries couldn’t be further apart. While we have embraced growth, openness and as low taxation as possible, France has gone in the opposite direction, especially under Hollande, with wholly predictable results.

Give it another decade and the statistics will be wildly out of skew too. Today London is the most visited city in the world, and its arts, museums, galleries and restaurants are thriving; in contrast, Paris, the erstwhile City of Light, is simply stagnating.

Even after the Entente Cordiale of 1904, which overturned many centuries of open enmity, there were to be particularly low points in the Anglo-French relationship – the nadir being reached in July 1940 with the Royal Navy’s sadly necessary sinking of the French fleet at Oran.

De Gaulle characterised that action as ‘one of those dark bursts by which the repressed instinct of this people smashes all barriers’.

In his writings about the French army, de Gaulle managed to omit mentioning Waterloo altogether, and described Britons as being driven by ‘coldness, ruthlessness and duplicity’.

Sometimes British and French national interests simply don’t coincide. Mary Tudor understood that, so did Admiral Nelson, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher – as well as Louis XIV, Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle, for that matter – and we mustn’t forget it now.