HERE’S a question for Mr Sarkozy. Someone enters Europe illegally, perhaps through Italy or Greece.

He makes his way, unhindered, to the French border. He crosses into France without any checks then travels the length of that country without being detained.

He wanders around Calais, still with no papers, but local gendarmes make no attempt to arrest him.

How is any of this Britain’s fault?

The former French President wants a political comeback. As part of his campaign he has denounced the deal whereby the UK and France may station customs officers on each other’s territories.

“Those who are here in Calais and who want to cross to England should be processed in England by the English,” he announced in Le Touquet, the northern French resort town where that deal was signed 13 years ago.

Really? A foreigner on French territory is our responsibility? Could it be that the famously slippery Sarko is hoping to divert attention from the record of previous French administrations on immigration — not least his own?

Sarko is not the first electioneering Frenchman to blame things on the Brits — or, rather, “the English.”

There is a market in France for anti-English sloganeering and, if we’re honest, the reverse is also true.

But for all the rhetoric, our two countries are generally pretty good at working together.

The Le Touquet deal is a fine example. France could see that, if illegal migrants thought they could enter Britain easily, they would be more likely to come to France, where a number of them would end up staying.

Making it harder to enter the UK was therefore in France’s interest.

The Le Touquet deal has delivered for both countries. While some migrants are determined to enter the UK secretly, and France remains their only route, the numbers are far fewer than they would otherwise be.

France is not experiencing anything like the pressures that are affecting Italy, Hungary, Austria, Germany or Sweden.

Relative to the size of their populations, France and the UK get fewer asylum applications per head than the EU average. The arrangement, in other words, is working.

Deep down, Nicolas Sarkozy knows this. After all, it was he who signed the Le Touquet accord in 2003, when he was interior minister. That’s what makes his current stance so hypocritical.

But he also knows he will struggle to come back after a presidential term marred by corruption and stagnation.

A spot of Brit-bashing never harmed a French politician’s prospects.

Why not call for the Calais “jungle”, as the refugee camp is known, to be moved to Kent?

British Remainers made the same threat during the recent referendum, but there won’t be a “jungle” in Kent any more than there are refugee camps at Heathrow or Gatwick.

Airlines are required to check before embarkation that a traveller’s papers are in order.

If they let someone board improperly, they face large fines.

If British immigration officers were evicted from Paris and Calais, their task would fall to the rail and ferry operators.

Eurostar journeys might become more expensive but there would be no increase in the number of illegal entrants.

One of the reasons the French government lets British immigration officers operate at both ends of the Eurostar is that it is a major shareholder in that train, and prefers the cost to be met by the British Home Office.

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The worst that would happen if the Le Touquet accord were scrapped is that Eurostar and Eurotunnel would have to do the job currently carried out by immigration officers.

It would be a mild nuisance. But the idea that Theresa May would allow large numbers of undocumented migrants to come from an already safe country to claim asylum on our soil is idiotic.

If Sarko proposed it in office, she would quite rightly tell him to get stuffed.

There are, in any case, more useful ways for Britain to help.

We are already the single most generous aid donor in Europe, paying to shelter Syrian refugees in front-line countries for a fraction of what it costs to house them in Europe.

We have deployed vessels in the Mediterranean to assist in the boat people crisis.

We should offer to work with France, as with all our European allies, to make their external borders more secure.

We should, if asked, help repatriate Calais migrants to their countries of origin.

The root cause of the problem, though, is not British policy. It is the EU’s decision to dismantle national borders.

That’s why migrants can travel from Chios to Calais without once being checked.

Indeed, each Schengen country has a perverse incentive to shove people on to the next one.

Until, that is, the migrants run up against the British frontier, which we wisely decided to keep in place.

The best thing the French could do would be to copy us and bring back their borders.

If Nicolas Sarkozy were to promise to leave the Schengen Zone, and control France’s southern frontiers, he might hit on something even more popular than Brit bashing.

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