Lunchtime at the Gare du Nord, Friday. After a brief State visit to Paris, it was time to head home, pausing only for a gentle cafe/Cognac/Bloody Mary or three before boarding the Eurostar back to Blighty.
Over a ridiculously expensive baguette breakfast at the hotel, I’d been reading the Daily Mail’s online report about the ‘pure chaos’ at assorted European airports caused by the introduction of the EU’s new electronic EES (Entry/Exit System).
Thank goodness we’d let the train take the strain instead. Or so I thought until we hit the station, a good hour and a bit before the rattler was due to depart for St Pancras.
Think the last flight out of Kabul before the Taliban stormed back into town. The queues for the Eurostar snaked back to the street. Not for everyone, mind you, just UK passport holders.
Our ever-helpful French ‘partners’ had chosen le weekend rush as the appropriate time to roll out the EES for rail passengers.
It made the statutory security checks at Wembley Arena before the Counting Crows concert a couple of weeks ago look almost reasonable.
The queues turned out to be the least of anyone’s problems. Inevitably, the technology didn’t work properly. Families were split up and sent in different directions.
Miraculously, my passport was recognised and opened the e-gate. Mrs Littlejohn wasn’t so lucky. I looked round and she was being ushered away to the back of a distant queue. The lady next to me lost her husband and was reduced almost to tears.
Long story short, it was a good half hour until we were reunited. And not before Mrs L had been forced to go through three different passport inspections.
The French appeared to take perverse pleasure in forcing us to suffer the indignity of interminable queues and delay. It doesn’t matter how much Surkeir appeases them, they continue to treat us like dirt, writes Richard Littlejohn
While the French are bidding a fond adieu – not au revoir – to illegal migrants bound for Blighty, they are going out of their way to hobble UK passport holders trying lawfully to LEAVE France, writes Richard Littlejohn
All this time, the clock was ticking on our 13.07 departure. Along with hundreds of other UK passport holders being royally buggered about by the obdurate, uncaring Frogs.
But the best (depending on your point of view) was yet to come. We still had to clear ‘security’ before we would be allowed on board the train.
Naturally, there was only one scanner available for goodness-knows-how-many passengers in our section. The rules were, to say the least, confusing.
One minute you’re being told to leave your iPads, phones, etc in your case. The next, another jobsworth insists you take them out. There were posters demanding women (and, presumably some men) remove their earrings, in case they trigger the metal detectors.
My daughter, who somehow managed to overtake us in the EES sweepstakes despite being directed to the back of another queue, was subjected to a body search which just about fell short of a colonoscopy.
I haven’t seen ‘security’ like it since the US in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. And for what?
Yes, the EU is entitled to operate a biometric passport system. The Yanks have been doing it for donkey’s and these days have it down to a fine art. But the EU’s implementation is deliberately designed – for no other reason – to deliver another punishment beating to the British for having the audacity for voting Leave.
That should have been obvious to any UK passport holder treated like a terrorist by French officials last Friday.
French Gendarmes watch on as a small boat heads for England. More than 39,000 migrants have arrived in Britain on small boats in 2025
We’ve seen this before, with the manufactured queues of lorries at Calais and the pettifogging bureaucracy which blights trade.
We haven’t been forgiven for voting to take a hike from the sclerotic, anti-democratic EU. As some of us argued at the time, we should have quit the ECHR, too.
In the latest outrage, we now learn that because of the flawed post-Brexit agreement if we try to introduce a smoking ban in Northern Ireland we could face unlimited fines from the European Courts, because of objections from Greece and Romania.
Really? Why the hell should the free will of a British Parliament (whatever you think of the last election result or the smoking ban) be overruled by foreign governments to whom we owe absolutely nothing?
Pound to a penny, though, Labour will cave in. A proper Government would stick up for the interests of the British people they are supposed to represent. But Surkeir and his far-Left mates in the yuman rites racket are in thrall to all things European.
Not just European, either. Starmer always assumes the position when it comes to foreign relations. Even those of us who are ferociously Atlanticist find his all-fours grovelling to Trump nauseating. His craven indulgence of the Chinese is even worse. It now looks certain that – having indirectly handed Peking control of the Chagos Islands – he’s going to overrule everyone from MI5 to the local council and let the Chinese build a gigantic superspy centre next to Tower Bridge.
But primarily, it is over his appeasement in Europe that Surkeir’s true colours are on display.
His proud ‘reset’ with the EU has been nothing more than a shameful sell-out of British interests, from giving away our fishing waters to the French to continuing Boris’s betrayal of Northern Ireland.
Yes, the EU is entitled to introduce its biometric passport system giving priority to its own citizens. But why the hell aren’t we doing the same?
I’ve written here before that, post Brexit, we should have constructed ‘UK Only’ lanes at Heathrow and other airports. Yet, nine years after the referendum, we are still expected to line up behind EU passport holders to get back into our own country.
Last Friday, the French appeared to take perverse pleasure in forcing us to suffer the indignity of interminable queues and delay. It doesn’t matter how much Surkeir appeases them, they continue to treat us like dirt.
In addition to the unlimited bounty of the seas, we’ve given them the thick end of £750 million to ‘stop the boats’. Yet day after day, week after week, we see video of hundreds of young, unknown, foreign men of military age casting off from the French coast bound for Kent without any interference from the gendarmes.
Which brings us back to the Gare du Nord. While the French are bidding a fond adieu – not au revoir – to illegal migrants bound for Blighty, they are going out of their way to hobble UK passport holders trying lawfully to LEAVE France.
If this is intended deliberately to persuade us that we were foolish to vote to quit the EU – and obviously it is – then sorry, guv, but at least in my case, it’s had the opposite effect.
I’ve never been more convinced that we did the right thing. My contempt is reserved for the politicians at home and abroad who have conspired ever since to punish us for voting Leave and have moved heaven and earth to overturn the result of the referendum.
Top of the list is our current Prime Minister – not so much Surkeir as Surrender – who will always go out of his way to ensure that when it comes to our dealings with the EU, just like the Gare du Nord last Friday, the British are always sent to the back of the queue.