The French, bless them, can be so infuriating. There was De Gaulle's infamous "non" when we first wanted to join the EEC back in the Sixties.

They continue, illegally, to refuse to import our beef and their stiff-fingered response to threats from Brussels is a typical Gallic gesture.

The damaging effects on British farmers, road hauliers and others caused by their internal squabbles involving road and port blockades are a serious problem.

And now, their reluctance to impose effective 24-hour policing around Sangatte refugee camp has become an international scandal. So what is happening? Another raised, rigid digit is what is happening.

France's new Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy visited Sangatte last week and spent precisely five minutes there. He said extra fencing and new policing plans could be ready by September.

Now French officials have told the EEC in Brussels it will take at least six months. So, perhaps by Christmas? You can imagine the Gallic shrug as they passed on the news.

But whatever enthusiasm may be lacking in M. Sarkozy's approach to this problem, his ability to deflect the heat is world class.

At the end of his five-minute visit, with British and European Commission officials hanging on every word, he came up with the conclusion that the Sangatte chaos was all Britain's fault.

It was an audacious, impudent, political stroke. Ironically, it was also largely true.

He made the obvious point that immigrants flocked to Sangatte because of this country's lax regime for asylum seekers.

They were heading for Britain because they knew an asylum request was all they needed to be able to work here.

A tougher regime in Britain, he said, would deter immigrants, so the pressure on the Channel tunnel and the Channel ports would be removed.

The basic facts about asylum seekers in Britain are dispiriting. From a total of 29,640 in 1996, the figure had increased to 72, 430 last year with big improvements in welfare benefits.

There are about one million illegal immigrants living in Britain and asylum applicants have "disappeared" into the community at the rate of 137 a day during the past three years.

Of course we have a Home Secretary who is very good at talking up an apparently aggressive new initiative. Every time there is bad news, up leaps David Blunkett growling with Rottweiler ferocity.

He pretends to be tough but his policies have actually been feeble and ineffective. His latest threat to throw out bogus asylum seekers immediately, forcing them to appeal from abroad, was an ill-thought through initiative to counter news of dramatically increasing immigration figures.

However, I have a plan to harness the belligerence and irascibility of the French, guaranteed to solve the Sangatte impasse.

Their farm workers and lorry drivers are so effective at sealing off roads and ports, a ring of them round the camp would ensure no one ever got out of Sangatte again.

Eh, M. Sarkozy? 'Allo, 'allo.