A French warship fired 17 live rounds near a boat carrying Britain’s shadow home secretary as he observed French authorities escorting migrants towards the English coast.
Chris Philp, the Conservative Party’s spokesman on immigration and policing, accused the French military of attempting to intimidate him while he monitored illegal Channel crossings on Tuesday.
Philp was being interviewed aboard a fishing boat around two miles off the French coast when the patrol ship Flamant approached within approximately 300 metres and began firing a handgun into the water.
“It felt to me like an attempted intimidation to stop us covering migrant crossings,” Philp said. He claimed that the vessel fired only while passing close to the British boat and that no advance warning was given.
Matt Coker, the fishing boat’s captain, said he had never experienced a similar incident in 28 years at sea.
The French military rejected Philp’s allegations and said its sailors had been conducting a routine small-arms training exercise. It insisted that the required warning signals had been displayed and that the British boat was outside the firing zone.
Photographs showed a French sailor firing towards a target being towed behind the warship, in the opposite direction from Philp’s boat. The British government contacted Paris for an explanation.
Philp rejected the French account as “not credible,” saying: “They fired the live rounds at the closest point of approach to us—and didn’t fire anything that we saw before or after. It looked and sounded exactly like deliberate intimidation.”
Later that day, journalists accompanying Philp watched a heavily overcrowded migrant dinghy leave Hardelot-Plage, around 30 miles south of Calais.
A French coastguard vessel, police boat and inflatable patrol craft surrounded the dinghy but made no attempt to stop it, even when it returned to the beach to collect five more migrants. French officers instead handed life jackets to people aboard before escorting the vessel towards British waters.
The incident came as migrants reportedly launched another boat from Fécamp in Normandy, around 70 miles from the English coast—the longest known route attempted by a migrant dinghy from France.
Some 13,320 migrants have reached Britain in small boats so far this year, 44% fewer than during the same period in 2025. However, nearly 900 have arrived since Prime Minister Andy Burnham entered Downing Street.
Philp said he would raise the warship incident with the French ambassador.
