With British airports in chaos with flights cancelled and delayed and the UK’s ports paralysed by increased waiting times for post-Brexit passport checks, many British holidaymakers are reportedly resorting to desperate measures to reach the continent. “After hours at sea, in an overcrowded rubber boat, we finally made it to shore near Dover,” says asylum seeker Ashok Kamelpharti, describing the bizarre reception he and his fellow Afghan refugees received as they came ashore. “Suddenly, this huge crowd of British people came rushing toward us – we thought that they were going to attack us and push us back out to sea, but instead they started dragging us out of our boat and were offering us money for it! It was quite extraordinary – I had heard the English were eccentric, but I never expected to greeted by hordes of sweaty men with knotted handkerchiefs on their heads waving rolls of cash in my face!” According to Kamelpharti, over thirty Britons, complete with luggage, piled into the rubber boat and were last seen heading back out to sea, in the direction of France. “The ones who couldn’t get in the boat were just left standing there at the water’s edge, looking wistfully out to sea,” he recalls. “Then they spotted another boat full of refugees being towed in by a lifeboat and rushed over to mob that!”

The desperation of British holidaymakers to reach France by any means possible has led to a shortage of small boats available for use by people smugglers based in France, resulting in a sharp hike in the prices they are charging actual refugees to get them into the UK by sea. “It’s ridiculous, their fees are sky high now,” opines Kamelpharti, whose brother is still stuck in France, awaiting passage to England. “Genuine refugees are being priced out of the market. Even if you can meet their fees, then there is a long waiting list for a boat as they are all being hijacked by the British.” Indeed, some refugees are being forced into even more desperate ways of crossing the Channel, with shops in French seaside resorts reporting that they are selling out of lilos and other inflatables. According to news reports, only this week a dozen refugees were reported drowned after attempting to cross the Channel on an inflatable banana. But it isn’t just the physical means to make crossings that are in short supply in France, with the people smugglers themselves fast disappearing, as they find a far more lucrative market in aiding British holidaymakers make illegal crossings to the continent.

“What’s the point in trying to exploit poor bastards who have no money and even less hope by helping them enter a country that doesn’t want them, when you can get the big bucks from Britons desperate for the sun?” muses Alphonse Querisi, a people smuggler formerly based in Cherbourg, but now working out of Folkestone. “It is unbelievable how desperate these pasty-skinned bastards are to circumvent the very restrictions they chose when they voted for Brexit! They’ll pay you just about anything you ask in order to get out of the UK without having to queue at passport controls for three days!” Querisi argues, though, that the UK’s obsession with immigration makes his job of smuggling out holidaymakers relatively easy. “That’s the thing – the authorities are looking for people trying to get into the UK by nefarious means.” he explains. “They never bother with boats and vehicles going out. Right now, I’m working on packing tourists into containers and having them shipped out, en masse, that way.” The danger with this scheme, the smuggler concedes, is that shipping delays caused by increased post-Brexit paperwork might lead to containers full of holidaymakers being trapped in British ports for days or weeks. “It is my fear that I see on the TV of a container full of dead British holidaymakers in ‘Kiss Me Quick’ hats and clutching buckets and spades is found at at a port,” admits Querisi. “I mean, I might be ripping them off, but the bottom line is that I’m just trying to facilitate their hard earned summer holiday, not condemn them to a horrible death.”

Even for those who do manage to reach the shores of France via perilous boat journey, the danger isn’t over. “It’s a bit like the Normandy landings,” says Alf Fender, who recently made such a crossing with his family. “When you hit that beach, you just have to put your head down and run as fast as you can, before the Gendarmes see you and try to force you back into the sea. If you can make it off the beach and into a town, you are usually safe, especially if you book into a hotel as quickly as possible.” Alf’s crossing, however, was not without incident, with his seventy one year old mother in law unable to keep up the pace after reaching the beach. “She just ran out of breath and collapsed,” he recalls. “She might have been having a heart attack. Anyway, the cops shoved her back in our dinghy and pushed her out sea – that’s the last we saw of her, prone in an inflatable boat, drifting further and further away.” Nonetheless, Fender still thinks the crossing was worth it, despite the loss, as it meant avoiding twelve hours of queueing at Ramsgate.

Getting back from the continent has, though, proven problematic for the Brexit queue dodgers as, without the requisite stamps in their passports, they can’t prove that they left the UK legally when they try to return by conventional means. Many have found themselves classified as illegal immigrants and sent to refugee camps in France. The alternative is to attempt an illegal crossing back to the UK but, as Alf Fender and his family found, this too can be fraught with danger. “We managed to get hold of another inflatable boat and started back across the Channel, but part way across, we got into trouble and started taking on water,” he explains. “But then this lifeboat appeared – one of the ships we passed must have called them – and we thought we’d be OK and get back to good old Blighty safely. Which we did, but then found ourselves arrested as illegal immigrants! The racist Border Force bastards said we weren’t pale enough to be British on account of our sun tans and that our passports were fake! Next thing we knew, we were being put on a flight to bloody Rwanda and told we’d have to make our asylum claim from there!” Stories such as Fender’s have moved a local Tory councillor in Kent to propose a new ‘Dunkirk’ evacuation to safely bring back holidaying Brits who have used unorthodox methods to reach their holiday destinations. “We need to muster a modern day fleet of little ships and boats to go over there and take them off the beaches – under fire from the French, if necessary,” says Horace Frolickingly-Bare. “I’m calling now for every small boat and yacht owner to register their vessels with Broadstairs council with a view to forming up our valiant rescue fleet as soon as possible in order to get our plucky tourists safely back home!”