Donald Macintyre's Sketch: Two nations divided by some uncommon language

As ententes go this was not madly cordiale. True, the Home Affairs committee chairman, Keith Vaz, did his best to make the Mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, feel at home by thanking her in excruciatingly accented French for coming along to “discuter ce sujet tres important”. In the event, Ms Bouchart must have wondered whether it wasn’t bad enough to have an asylum seeker crisis in your town without crossing the Channel to be told by a bunch of British MPs it was all your fault.

Blaming the French was the theme of the day. Several MPs were sore about Ms Bouchart’s claim that it was all because they were desperate to come here: “These people are prepared to die to come to England.” Which they may do, in ever-larger numbers, given UK policy of not rescuing drowning migrants long before they reach Calais.

The whole proceeding was translated by an interpreter. Which didn’t deter the Tory MP Michael Ellis from applying the technique adopted by so many Brit holidaymakers addressing foreigners: speaking more loudly. She shouldn’t be “coming to the British taxpayers to expect them to solve French problems”, he said.

Disorder broke out when Vaz, after Labour’s Ian Austin similarly harangued Ms Bouchart, noted that nobody was suggesting a migrant reception centre in his Dudley constituency and then threatened him with having to “leave the committee” when Austin loudly protested that this was no laughing matter. Perhaps Vaz had seen Austin’s tweet accusing him of being a “show-off” for starting the session in schoolboy French.

But Ms Bouchart stood her ground. The Lib Dem Julian Huppert reeled off various academic studies challenging Ms Bouchart’s claim that £36 per week payments were luring asylum seekers to Britain. Studies were fine, but the reality was better, she said. Or, “Les etudes, c’est bien. Mais la realite, c’est mieux.” It sounded even more withering in French.