An undercover British reporter has filmed French police removing four suspected people smugglers from a migrant dinghy in the English Channel and taking them back to the French coast.
Christian Drogan, a journalist with the independent outlet Watchman Media, posed as a criminal on the run in Spain to buy a place on the boat. His account was published on August 25 by The Daily Telegraph, which shared the byline with journalist Isabel Oakeshott, and the footage was broadcast by TalkTV.
Drogan said he agreed a fee of €1,400 with the gang after abandoning attempts to pass himself off as a foreign national. He spent months contacting smuggling networks around Calais and Dunkirk in northern France.
A first attempt failed when the overloaded boat stalled in shallow water and a gendarme slashed the hull. The migrants were given a replacement vessel free of charge within 24 hours, he said.
The second boat carried 36 people and reached Dover after about seven hours. As it moved towards open water several passengers asked to leave, and Drogan said he realised they were the traffickers, not nervous asylum seekers.
His footage shows a gendarmerie patrol boat drawing alongside, with officers telling those on board in English that the sea ahead was dangerous and turning back the better option. Drogan said the four smugglers were the only ones to accept, and that they were patted down for weapons before being put ashore.
“What a neat way to avoid a very lengthy round trip to the UK,” he wrote.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, whose party would use the Royal Navy to turn boats around, said the British and French Governments were “colluding and allowing a criminal trafficking enterprise”.
Home Office figures show 14,526 people reached the UK by small boat between January 1 and August 2, 43 per cent fewer than at the same point in 2025. July nonetheless produced an average of 72 passengers per vessel, the highest since the series began in 2018.
Britain is paying France around £660 million (€760 million) to police its northern coastline. French officers have intercepted 185 crossing attempts and stopped more than 4,300 people from reaching British shores since a new enforcement deal took effect in April, the Home Office said.
Frontex, the European Union border agency, detected some 9,900 attempts to leave the bloc for the UK across the Channel between January and April, close to half the number recorded a year earlier.
French police may not intervene against boats already at sea unless lives are at risk, a restriction Paris has been reviewing since gangs began using offshore “taxi boats”.
