The politicians have had at least two decades to come up with a plan to tackle the migrant crisis. They can't claim they didn't see it coming.
Back in the year 2000, I invented a spoof game show called ASYLUM! after an Afghan airliner was hijacked and diverted to Stansted.
Instead of arresting the hijackers and banging them up in Belmarsh to await deportation, the authorities decided to billet them in a local airport hotel.
The rules of the game were quite simple: 'The competition is open to everyone buying a ticket or stowing away on one of our partner airlines, ferry companies or Eurostar. No application ever refused, reasonable or unreasonable. All you have to do is destroy your papers and remember the magic password: ASYLUM!
Migrants arriving in Kent after crossing the Channel earlier this week
'Hundreds of lawyers, social workers and counsellors are waiting to help. It won't cost you a penny. So play today. It could change your life for ever.
'Iraqi terrorists, Afghan dissidents, Albanian gangsters, Kosovan drug-smugglers, Tamil Tigers, bogus Bosnians, Rwandan mass murderers, Somali guerillas . . .
'COME ON DOWN!'
That column was headlined: 'Hijack an airliner and win a council house.' It was meant to be a joke, not a Dummy's Guide to settling in Britain. It's been doing the rounds on the internet ever since. A columnist on another newspaper liked it so much she downloaded it verbatim and passed it off as all her own work.
I can only assume that it went down well at the Home Office, too. For the past two decades, those charged with enforcing our borders have been rolling out the red carpet for migrants from all over the world.
The generosity of our welfare and legal systems — and the near-certainty that they will never be deported — will continue to ensure that hundreds of thousands more migrants from the Middle East and beyond will be determined to make that hazardous journey
An entire industry, funded by the mug British taxpayer to the tune of goodness-knows-how-many hundreds of millions of pounds, has been created to throw up interminable legal challenges to prevent anyone being deported.
To the best of my knowledge, none of those Afghan hijackers was ever sent home. Practically no one who manages to set foot on British soil is. This week the Government was forced to admit it has managed to deport only five of the 23,400 migrants who have crossed the Channel this year.
A couple of days ago, it was revealed that at least one migrant had arrived on a jet ski, after it was found floating off Dungeness.
That's in addition to the flotillas of dinghies used by people-smuggling gangs to transport their desperate human cargo to the Kent coast.
Er, sorry, but this column beat them to it again. In May 2016, I wrote a spoof Shipping Forecast, illustrated by a brilliant Gary cartoon featuring migrants heading for Britain on an assortment of inflatables — including a giant banana, a children's paddling pool and an inflatable dinosaur.
I even speculated that it was only a matter of time before someone landed at Dover clinging to one of Del Boy's blow-up sex dolls. And that shipping forecast also had migrants in rubber rings being towed ashore by, yep, a jet ski.
You couldn't make it up. Except, not for the first time, I did.
Look, I've said often enough that I don't blame anyone for seeking a better life. TV pictures concentrate on the smattering of women and small children being helped off the rafts.
But nobody has ever adequately explained why 90 per cent of those arriving here are young men of military age — like the headbanger who blew himself up outside Liverpool Women's Hospital at the weekend. And about whom we know precisely nothing.
Migrants are escorted by Border Force staff into Dover harbour after crossing the channel in Dover, Kent
It's no good expecting the French to stem the tide, no matter how many millions of euros Priti Flamingo bungs the gendarmes. France opened up the Sangatte departure lounge as early as 1999 and has always been happy to wave off migrants intent on
