The Daily Mail called the plan a "joke". The Express said it was a "cave-in". The Telegraph condemned the French president's "Brexit lies".

It turns out that what the more progressive wing of the UK press accepted as a pragmatic and reasonable compromise in an attempt to curb illegal immigration across the English Channel was never going to placate the nation's more xenophobic hacks. 

Quelle surprise. 

After all, it involved an agreement with England's most ancient and terrible enemies... the French.

Many on the Right were still calling for the immediate and summary deportation of asylum-seekers to Central Africa, despite all the legal obstacles. Most of those also saw that as a route – an excuse – to rescind the United Kingdom's commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights. Like their idol Donald Trump, international law and transnational norms have never featured prominently on their lists of priorities.

Of course, they're never going to be happy with anything Keir Starmer ever does. This is because there's only one thing that they hate more than foreigners, Muslims, minorities, and any group of people they perceive as fundamentally different from themselves. And that thing is Mr. Starmer himself.

Or, rather, it's a quality embodied by Starmer, at least as they see it (though some of his own MPs may beg to differ on that point). What they loathe is the liberal consensus – or what they see as the liberal elite. It is, after all, a self-styled consensus which never gained, or sought, their consent.

So, they were never going to roll over and say thank you and well done to a centrist British Prime Minister who had just secured a so-called "one-in-one-out" deal with Emmanuel Macron to send back to France one person who'd travelled unlawfully across the Channel in return for each one who's legal claim of asylum in the UK is successfully achieved. 

The proposed pilot scheme was, after all, expected only to see 50 such people sent back to France each week

It is not, of course, that numbers are everything. In 2024, 37,000 people were detected attempting to cross the Channel illegally in small boats. In that same year, 948,000 people migrated to the UK. The populist Right's attempts to spotlight the issue of these small boats as the most pressing concern of the day ignores the fact that, even if every single one of those refugees (many originating from countries destabilized by western interventions) were to be successful in their claims for asylum in Britain, they would account for less than four per cent of the nation's total immigration figures. 

Right-wing newspapers were enraged when President Macron, unveiling the deal alongside the British premier, said that the UK had been 'sold a lie' when the campaigners for Brexit had claimed the leaving the European Union would 'make it possible to fight more effectively against illegal immigration' – and went on to point out that Britain's departure from the EU without a returns agreement had created 'an incentive to make the crossing, the precise opposite of what Brexit had promised.'

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Meanwhile, the forces of right-wing populism continue conveniently to ignore the fact that, regardless of small boat crossings, net migration has risen significantly since Brexit – the event for which they so arduously campaigned and which they promised would offer the panacea to all our problems.

Not that there's anything wrong with net migration. An influx of working-age people can, in fact, boost an economy and increase revenues, particularly one in which growing proportions of the population are either retired or claiming benefits as being unable to cope with the stresses of work. 

But, inevitably, for a society to support that influx, it needs to increase its investment in public services, most crucially in education and healthcare. When recent right-wing, Brexit-loving administrations have failed to do so, and most obviously failed to invest a promised Brexit dividend of £350 million a week directly into the National Health Service, the resulting public service crises (crises of their own making) can most conveniently (and, it seems, convincingly) be blamed by those same populists on migrant populations (populations their own efforts have boosted).

After all, let's not allow a few unfortunate facts to get in the way of an emotive argument. 

It was back in 2016, in the run-up to the Brexit vote, that a politician called Michael Gove (who was at the time serving as Lord Chancellor, but who has always primarily served his own interests) famously declared that the country had had enough of experts. The notoriously treacherous opportunist, who went on to stab his friend and ally Boris Johnson in the back more than once, captured the national zeitgeist when he railed against our repeated capitulation to knowledge and set the stage for the rise of a barbarism, which would see moderate rationalism constantly challenged, and sometimes trounced, by the basest instincts of the populist Right. 

Those instincts have underpinned an increasingly impatient politics, a politics charged by an understandable sense of social injustice which has ended up turning its back on the slow solutions offered by progressive (but often patronising) voices, and which instead now seeks quick and easy (though irrational and unworkable) answers from wealthy charlatans who claim (falsely) to be on the wavelength of ordinary folk, to be, that is, women or men 'of the people'.

Sir Keir, the socially awkward knight, lawyer, and centrist, will never be seen as a man of the people. Rightly or wrongly, this son of a toolmaker will always be viewed with suspicion as a self-made scion of the establishment.

He lacks the Reform UK leader's capacity to sit in a pub, downing endless pints of beer and spouting the kind of loathsome nonsense that so many pun-drunks like to spout.

He'll never appeal to that section of the electorate attracted by Nigel Farage's show of hearty bonhomie. They'll never vote for Starmer because doing so would mean they'd have to admit (if only to themselves) that they had been catastrophically wrong.

Which is why he should stop attempting to do so. He needs to stop trying to be Reform-lite. He should declare that his endeavours to stop the illegal crossings of the Channel in small boats is primarily a bid to smash the criminal gangs, which profit massively by exploiting the desperation of asylum-seekers, and to save the lives of so many of those refugees (including many children) who perish when their little boats capsize. 

He should make it clear that the agreement with France isn't about Britain attempting to dodge its human rights commitments but is, on the contrary, a humanitarian act in itself.

But he almost certainly won't do that. This is because, just as when, in May, he echoed the historic rhetoric of the Far Right in a speech on immigration (wording he later disavowed), he seems set on trying to court the support not of Labour's traditional base, nor of floating centrists, but of the populists who'd not go near him for all the tea in China, all the pork in Washington, or all the gammon in Reform UK. 

His biggest problem is that he wants everyone to like him. But if he carries on like this, he'll find that nobody will.