France cancels UK invitation to migrant crisis talks after Johnson letter

France has withdrawn an invitation to UK home secretary Priti Patel to join talks on the migrant crisis following a public letter from Prime Minister Boris Johnson to President Macron.

“Priti Patel is no longer invited to the interministerial meeting on Sunday which will go ahead with France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and the European Commission,” a senior French official said on Friday.

The official described the letter as “unacceptable and contrary to our discussions”.

The UK and France have been struggling to co-ordinate their response to the death of 27 migrants on Wednesday, who drowned trying to cross the English Channel from France.

The letter called for French and British reciprocal maritime patrols in each other’s territorial waters and for the thousands of migrants who reach English shores to be returned to France.

Johnson wrote on Thursday night: “If those who reach this country were swiftly returned, the incentive for people to put their lives in the hands of traffickers would be significantly reduced.”

French officials have complained that the British government is blaming Macron, including for problems associated with Brexit, for domestic political reasons. UK officials in turn say Macron is being difficult because he will be campaigning for re-election in April and is being criticised by his French nationalist opponents.

The official on Friday said Paris objected both to the content of Johnson’s letter and the fact that it was made public by the British.

After the tragedy on Wednesday, the Elysée Palace said Macron had told Johnson that the UK and France shared responsibility for the migrant issue, and that “he expected the British to co-operate fully and to abstain from exploiting a tragedy for political ends”. 

There was no immediate response on Friday morning from the UK’s Home Office to the withdrawal of the invitation. But Johnson’s suggestion that the two countries sign a bilateral agreement to return asylum seekers arriving in the UK to France — which Johnson in a Twitter thread on Thursday evening called the “biggest single step” the two countries could take to deter clandestine crossings — hit on a highly sensitive topic for the French side.

France has persistently rejected UK efforts to negotiate bilateral returns agreements, insisting that the process needs to be managed via a deal between the UK and the European Union.

A deal is needed to address the issues created by the UK’s withdrawal on December 31 last year from the Dublin Conventions, a deal among European states that allows the return of asylum seekers to safe countries through which they have passed on the way to claiming asylum elsewhere. The conventions also provide for reunions of families stranded in separate countries.

On Thursday morning, UK immigration minister Kevin Foster claimed to the BBC that the UK had offered both bilateral deals with single countries during the Brexit negotiations and a deal with the union as a whole but had been rebuffed.