Jeremy Clarkson has told Nigel Farage that his plan to use the Royal Navy to turn back small boats crossing the Channel is “impossible.”
Operation Fortress, unveiled last week, would have the Royal Navy intercept boats and return everyone aboard, what Reform calls “the largest military operation in the English Channel since World War Two.” Farage says it wouldn’t break international law because it’d be a “humanitarian” mission. France has already dismissed the plan outright, and a former Navy officer called it “a crock of shit.”
Clarkson used his Sunday Times column to join the pile-on. He acknowledged the usual objections first: “Most commentators have focused on the political problems of such a plan. They point out, with some justification, that if the British prime minister orders a Royal Navy warship to steam into a French port and deposit a couple of hundred Somalians on the quay, the French government and indeed the United Nations might have something to say about it. Others have explained that we don’t really have enough ships to mount such an operation. And they also have a point because when Cyprus came under attack recently, it took a whole week to mobilise a defensive flotilla, which, to our national shame, comprised exactly one ship.”
Then he raised something else entirely. “However, there’s another, even bigger problem with Nigel’s Send ’em Packing plan which is: it’s impossible.”
The actual physics of it
Clarkson’s specific objection was mechanical: “How, in the name of all that’s holy, does double-breasted Nige think it would be possible for a large warship to come alongside a much smaller dinghy, which is something it must do if the captain wishes to attach a tow rope?”
He pointed to 1997, when an Italian warship captain was jailed after colliding with an Albanian vessel, killing 81 people, several of them children. “This is what Nige hasn’t considered. How do you stop a boat that doesn’t want to be stopped? And how do you order a Royal Navy captain to do something which in all probability will cause him to spend several years in the Scrubs.”
He didn’t stop at the logistics. “It is of course politically colourful to conjure up the image of sleek British warships defending the realm. This sort of thing appeals to the Tommy Robinsonites. But if you really want to stem the flow, and I suspect most people do, you have to park the (imaginary) destroyers and use your noddle. Do that and you’ll quickly work out that to stop them coming here, you’ve got to stop them wanting to come here. You’ve got to make the UK less appealing than where they are now, which is France. This shouldn’t be too hard.”
Reform’s response
A Reform source told HuffPost UK: “I trust the senior veterans who endorsed our plan a little more than Jeremy Clarkson.”
That’s a genuine deflection rather than a rebuttal. Tom Sharpe, an actual former Royal Navy commander, has already said the fleet numbers simply don’t exist for an operation this size. Clarkson’s column adds a different, more basic objection on top: even with enough ships and France’s cooperation, you still can’t safely tow a dinghy that doesn’t want to be towed, without risking exactly the kind of disaster that put an Italian naval captain in prison.
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