Portrait of the week | 2 June 2016

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Two British men were charged with immigration offences after the rescue by night of 18 Albanian migrants, two of them children, from an inflatable boat off Dymchurch, Kent. ‘We don’t want the English Channel turning into the Mediterranean with fleets of small boats coming over,’ said Chris Grayling, the Leader of the House of Commons and a campaigner for Britain to leave the EU. Michael Gove, the Justice Secretary, Boris Johnson MP and Gisela Stuart, a Labour backbencher, said in an open letter to David Cameron, the Prime Minister, that the Conservative manifesto promise to reduce net immigration to ‘the tens of thousands’ was ‘plainly not achievable as long as the UK is a member of the EU, and the failure to keep it is corrosive of public trust in politics’. At the G7 summit in Japan, Mr Cameron repeated the scheme he had mooted in March of sending a British warship to waters off Libya to deter migrants and seize boats taking arms to the Islamic State.