‘Brown is very good — no Cameron. David Cameron no good,’ he said. Just in case we weren’t sure what he meant, he repeated, ‘Brown I like. Labour government I like. I like the Brown. I like the Tony Blairs. David Cameron no good.’ It was such an odd thing, to hear praise for Gordon Brown, and doubly so because it came from an asylum-seeker who had never been to the UK. He was talking to Michael Goldfarb in Calais, while trying to find a way to get across the Channel.
It’s almost four years since Brown left office. His tenure as PM is rarely, if ever, talked about in the UK. Yet here he was on a pedestal, above even Tony Blair, and put there by a refugee from the Afghan wars who could hardly speak English.
Yet it was not the oddest moment on From Kabul to Kent (Radio 5 Live, Saturday). Goldfarb’s real focus was Ali, who was forced to leave his home in an Afghan village in 1999, aged just 14. The Taleban were searching for recruits and press-ganging anyone with gun-toting potential. Ali managed to escape, after dark, with the help of his uncle. It took him two years to reach Calais, hitching lifts, walking for hundreds of miles, using every resource he had to survive, without family, funds or any knowledge of foreign languages, only to find himself stuck in Sangatte, the camp for refugees set up by the Red Cross, just half a mile from the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. How now was he to reach his goal — England?
Ali walked out of Sangatte in broad daylight and jumped on to the back of a train. When it slowed down at the entrance to the tunnel (where the police were waiting on the lookout for stowaways), he found a hiding place under the wheel of a lorry.
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