Nigel Hastilow: Pike, border control is down to you

As loopy-loo ideas go, surely this one takes the biscuit. Especially as Ministers can’t even complain they haven’t got enough money to employ properly trained and incorruptible individuals.

It seems Ministers are worried illegal immigrants, drug-smugglers and other criminals have got bored with trying to hi-jack lorries travelling to Britain via the Channel Tunnel.

It’s much easier to fetch up at some unconsidered harbour on the east coast or at a remote airport used by amateur pilots than it is to try sneaking into Britain through the most obvious entry points.

Who knows how many people are getting into Britain through these unmanned entry-points? The Government certainly doesn’t.

And Ministers are so worried about it they plan to take decisive action. That is to say, they want a whole band of Captain Mainwearings and Private Pikes to take responsibility for preventing criminals from exploiting the gaping holes in our permeable borders.

Inevitably these guardians of our nation would not have any power. They would not be able to arrest anyone, for instance, nor could they interrogate suspects.

Which does make you wonder what exactly they would do except, perhaps, sit round a brazier watching people come and go with no questions asked.

I suppose in theory they would have a hot line to the real border force, or even the police, assuming they’re not too busy at the time.

But with no pay and long all-night vigils in deserted spots, there might be a temptation to turn a blind eye once in a while when an illicit operation is under way.

There’s money in people-smuggling – and even more if criminals are running drugs – and it would cost them a small fraction of their earnings to grease the palms of a volunteer or two on guard at the real-life equivalents of Walmington-on-Sea.

It’s not surprising the official experts in our laughingly-titled ‘Border Force’ are reluctant to station themselves in windswept coastal towns in the dead of winter.

They prefer to exercise their skill in judgment in more attractive locations such as boutique hotels in the Caribbean.

Last January three officers spent three weeks and £18,000 of our money luxuriating in the winter sunshine at the picturesque Sugar Ridge Resort, which describes itself as ‘Antigua’s newest four-star luxury beach resort’.

They were supposedly advising the Antiguan customs authorities on how to improve their anti-smuggling measures at the main airport.

The hotel in question is about an hour’s drive from the airport but, according to the Home Office, it provided ‘the requisite level of security’ for our intrepid border guards.

That’s probably because, as well as ‘first class service and luxurious amenities’, Sugar Ridge offers an ‘exotic tropical hillside providing undisturbed seclusion’. Nice work if you can get it.

Meanwhile back on the beaches and airstrips of Middle England, our border force is so strapped for cash it can’t afford to employ people to keep us safe.

The Home Office says there’s very little difference between its new scheme and the employment of special constables by police forces up and down Britain.

Yet hobby-bobbies do have the same powers as regular police officers. The border ‘specials’ would be impotent even though there must be a need for a genuine force to protect the country.

In 2016-17, the Border Force seized a record 4,503 kilos of cocaine from 6,672 separate incidents. Yet in 2008-9, there were 7,680 seizures which suggests more drug smugglers are getting away with it.

As for illegal immigration, nobody has a clue. The border force is sometimes extremely vigilant – when plane-loads of tourists return from Lanzarote, for instance, it can take forever to get through immigration (you can never be too careful when it comes to families taking a holiday in the sun).

But the suspicion remains that it’s as easy to smuggle a person into the UK as it is to smuggle a consignment of drugs.

This is a subject the Home Office is desperate to avoid discussing. It hasn’t published an official estimate of the number of people in Britain illegally since 2005, back in the days when Tony Blair wanted to open our borders to all-comers.

At the time, the Home Office put the total number of illegal immigrants at 430,000.

That was, in any case, a guess and two years ago Rob Whiteman, then the head of the Border Agency, admitted the figure was more like one million.

Since then, secret Home Office documents suggest between 150,000 and 250,000 foreign nationals ‘fail to return to their home country’.

So the real total could be anything up to about two million which makes the Government’s pledge to cut immigration to ‘tens of thousands’ look pretty sick.

But can we really stem the tide with a collection of amateurs? I can’t help thinking, in the words of Corporal Frazer, ‘We’re doomed.’