❓WHAT HAPPENED: Britain’s Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, was pelted with bottles and confronted with a “curved machete” during a visit to a migrant camp near Calais, France.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: The Conservative (Tory) Party’s Chris Philp, Member of Parliament (MP) for Croydon South and Shadow Home Secretary, and migrants including an unnamed man wielding a machete.
📍WHEN & WHERE: Tuesday evening to Wednesday afternoon, in the “New Jungle” migrant camp outside Dunkirk, France.
💬KEY QUOTE: “People who pull knives, these people are on their way to the UK in dinghies and we were certainly seriously threatened just a few minutes ago.” – Chris Philp
🎯IMPACT: The incident highlights the escalating dangers at migrant camps and the threat to the British public posed by unvetted migrants crossing the English Channel in increasing numbers, with small boat crossings surpassing 50,000 since Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party entered office in mid-2024.
Chris Philp, the British Shadow Home Secretary and Member of Parliament (MP) for Croydon South, faced a violent confrontation during a visit to a migrant camp near Calais, France, where he was pelted with bottles and threatened with a “curved machete.”
The incident occurred at the “New Jungle” camp outside Dunkirk, where Philp traveled on Tuesday evening to assess the situation on the ground—with migrants having long camped along the French coast in large numbers while they wait to break into Britain by stowing away in trucks or, increasingly, via small boats. Successive British governments have paid the French hundreds of millions of pounds to police the area, but crossings have continued to increase.
Philp reported that a man brandished a machete at him, swinging it in the air to intimidate others in the camp. He described the experience as “pretty shocking” and noted the presence of up to around 2,000 migrants in the camp, many already carrying life jackets. The visit came as the number of such crossings since Labour took power last year exceeded 50,000.
We were attacked today at the migrant camp dubbed “The Jungle 2” just outside Dunkirk
We were threatened with a machete, pelted with bottles & our car hit as we sped off
Those responsible are likely to be in the UK soon in a taxpayer funded hotel
This border madness must end pic.twitter.com/pkST0TR4bz
— Chris Philp MP (@CPhilpOfficial) August 13, 2025
Notably, Philp was a Minister of State at the Home Office—broadly responsible for border security, immigration enforcement, policing, and national security in the British government—and the previous Conservative government, which allowed the Channel crisis to take hold and grow progressively worse in the first place.
Reform Party leader Nigel Farage regularly criticized Philp for the Conservatives’ mismanagement of illegal immigration during his time in office, noting in 2021, “Our hopeless immigration minister Chris Philp is in Calais today. Making sure our recent 54 million pound donation to the French is being used to stop migrants leaving French beaches. 1,300 have come in the last 3 days! Minister, you have been mugged.”
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