La Bataille De Douvres - Eh Merde

And so the excuses are deployed, the blame game reconfigured, the right-leaning part of our free and fearless press duly briefed: that which cannot be named has caused another traveller’s headache, thousands of holidaymakers have been delayed, with the conclusion as before. Brexit has bestowed upon us another of its negative benefits, and so it is someone else’s fault.

Schools broke up for the summer last week; it followed that there would be an exodus across the Channel beginning at the weekend. Airports would also be busier than usual, although, unlike at Easter, they had to yield the shock value crown to Dover, and to an extent the Channel Tunnel. Lorries faced yet more of those 18-hour delays. For holidaymakers it was a mere six hours.

The reason for this delay? Those days when passports would be proferred but waved away at French border posts were now over: as the UK had left the EU, and was now a Third Country, going from there to France meant crossing the EU’s external border. Passports must therefore have an entry stamp, and an exit stamp when passing in the opposite direction.

That enables EU member states to calculate how many of the 90 day allowance the passport holder has used up. All of this was signed up to when alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his merry men did the deal, executed their Oven Ready Turkey. We signed for it, it was what we wanted as part of Taking Back Control. But here a problem entered.

Admitting that the passport examination and stamping was the cause of those delays would mean admitting that Bozo and Co had fouled up, that there were no Brexit unicorns. This could never be allowed to happen. And so it came to pass that it was, as always when the Tories and Brexit coincide, someone else’s fault. And that someone else was the dastardly French.

Liz Truss (for it was she) told the French to sort their act out, and to make sure this was heard by her intended audience, she told them on the front page of the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph. But her intended audience was not the French Government: it was the membership of the Tory Party. Nonetheless, this became the established wisdom.

So Dover’s Tory MP Natalie Elphicke also blamed the French. They were foreign, they were in the EU, therefore They Done It. She backed Brexit, therefore Brexit could not be the problem. It was left to travel expert Simon Calder, first seen brandishing a suspiciously European-looking passport outside London’s King’s Cross station, to bring the inconvenient truth.

Even before broadcaster LBC told “Port of Dover boss Doug Bannister tells LBC that it is 'absolutely true' that Brexit is ultimately to blame for the extreme delays at the port of Dover”, Calder had reminded us “Since Brexit, everybody has to have their passport not just looked at, but properly stamped. That’s something we insisted on when we left the EU”. Soon he was off to Dover.

His verdict? “The blunt fact is leaving the EU has made leaving the UK much more difficult … it’s basically about 70 seconds … because the frontier official [has to stamp passports] - we asked to be treated like this, they’re not picking on us … we said we wanted to be third country nationals, we want to have our passports stamped when we go into Europe, we want to have all of that bureaucracy, that’s what we asked for”. No-one’s fault bar our own.

Not surprisingly, this inability of our Government and its press pals to come clean with the public caused irritation across the Channel: after the Blame The French Ploy was enacted, “French Transport Minister Clement Beaune hit back, saying France was not responsible for the additional border checks brought on by Brexit”. We should not blame what we wanted on others.

But blame it we will. The problem for Bozo and his potential successors is that an increasing number of that formerly adoring public is seeing through the fog of misinformation: Brexit has bestowed another of its benefits, and so Brexit is to blame. Along with the charlatans who sold it to us.

Brexit means bureaucracy. It means queuing. It means delays. Sad, really.

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