On November 25, news broke that twenty-seven desperate people had died trying to cross the English Channel to seek asylum. The event was rightly widely described as a tragedy, but it was also taken as an opportunity by pundits on the Right to reinforce calls for a further toughening of asylum rules and to talk up the UK’s “pull factors” while passing blame for the deaths onto “vile smugglers” and the French authorities.

With Channel-crossing migration topping the news agenda regularly once again, Tory strategists have been desperate for a silver bullet to put a permanent end to these journeys. Some have begun looking at those used by Greece’s center-right New Democracy government as a possible model.

It was during a mid-November visit to the UK by Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, in which he gave cheerful interviews to Good Morning Britain and the Telegraph, that the latter ran stories on the Home Office’s plans for “Greek-style crackdowns on migrants” and the UK and Greece’s shared visions on “how to deal with migrants.”