Was Boris Johnson’s blunt letter to the French a mistake?

Boris Johnson may well be right that the best deterrent to migrants and refugees crossing the channel in flimsy, life-endangering dinghies would be for the UK and France to agree a ‘bilateral readmissions agreement to allow all illegal migrants who cross the Channel to be returned’.

The question is whether he was well advised – or advised at all – to put that blunt request in a letter to the French president that he immediately put in the public domain via Twitter.

The French government appears to have been blindsided and to have taken immediate offence. And Macron’s nose also seems to have been put out of joint by Johnson’s claim that France has made it a priority to negotiate a long-term ‘systematic [migrant] returns agreement’ between the whole EU and the UK, when France takes the presidency of the EU council.

This kind of spat between two rich European countries is unedifying when the lives of desperate people are at risk

You’ll have noticed that the French in response, or perhaps in retaliation, have disinvited the UK’s home secretary Priti Patel from a meeting of European home and interior ministers, that is being convened on Sunday to discuss the migrant crisis.