A Conservative MP says a French warship fired warning shots near a boat he was on in the Channel, and thinks it may have been an attempt to stop him drawing attention to the small boats crisis.
Chris Philp, the party’s home affairs spokesperson, was being interviewed by the BBC a couple of miles off Boulogne on Tuesday when the patrol vessel Flamant passed by. As it did, a French navy officer standing at the stern fired 17 shots from a handgun, aiming away from Philp’s boat.
Philp turned to BBC interviewer Michael Keohan mid-interview and said: “Is that toward us? I dunno.”
What Philp claims happened
After posting a video of the incident on X, Philp suggested it might have been a deliberate attempt to stop coverage of the small boats crisis. “There was no notice or training exercise in place,” he wrote. “Felt like warning shots or attempted intimidation.”
Why others aren’t convinced
Not everyone’s buying that interpretation. One former senior Border Force officer offered a more mundane explanation: “There are often exercises at sea involving the Royal or the French navy, and shots are occasionally fired, usually using blanks. This may be nothing at all.”
That’s a genuinely important caveat. Naval vessels conducting routine exercises in busy shipping lanes isn’t unusual, and gunfire during such exercises, often with blanks, doesn’t necessarily mean anything was actually aimed at, or intended for, a nearby civilian boat.
What the journalist on board saw
Keohan, who was there for the interview, called it “the most unusual moment… in the quiet of the Channel.” He said he saw a French patrol officer at the back of the boat pointing a pistol towards the sea, and believed that’s where the shots came from.
“There was no warning for our boat, no signs given that this was the French intention,” he said. “Even now it’s still not clear what the patrol boat was aiming at.”
The fishing boat’s captain agrees something felt off
Matt Coker, captain of the fishing boat Philp was aboard, said he also thought it looked like an attempt at intimidation. “It’s a bit strange that as they approached us there wasn’t fire or anything and then as they went past, afterwards there wasn’t fire or anything,” he said. “They only seemed to be firing the weapons when they were right alongside us. So I find that a bit strange because we’ve got all this open sea out here. So it sounds like it might have been an effort to intimidate us. It could well have been, it might have just been a little bit of a warning shot. Maybe just a show of force or something.”
Even Coker’s own account, though, leaves real uncertainty, “it might have just been a little bit of a warning shot” and “an effort to intimidate us” aren’t the same claim, and he doesn’t settle on one over the other.
What we don’t know
The French embassy and French coastguard have both been approached for comment, and neither has yet given an account of what the patrol vessel was actually doing or why shots were fired at that moment. Without that, it’s genuinely difficult to distinguish between three quite different possibilities: a coincidental training exercise, a routine show of force unrelated to the interview taking place nearby, or something more deliberately aimed at disrupting Philp’s coverage.
This incident lands amid an already tense period around Channel crossings and small boats policy, where cooperation with French authorities has become one of the central, and often contentious, elements of Britain’s approach to the issue. Whatever actually happened off Boulogne on Tuesday, it’s arrived at a moment where any friction, real or perceived, between the UK and French sides is likely to get read through a heavily political lens.
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