Volunteer clowns in red noses and dungarees have been performing for queues of migrants at a squalid camp near Dunkirk, metres from the tents of Kurdish people-smugglers organising the next Channel crossings.
UK newspaper The Telegraph reported that at Loon-Plage, an encampment in the industrial zone west of Dunkirk in northern France where around 2,500 people wait for passage to the UK, Dutch former Philips manager Laurence Quetel, 67, and her juggling troupe from the aid group Salam Nord have been trying to lift spirits with mime, high-fives and slapstick.
In collaboration with Salam Nord, a Calais and Dunkirk relief organisation that provides free food, she and her two fellow clowns, Anne and Jeroen, have spent a week at Loon-Plage.
Salam Nord/Pas-de-Calais was set up after the French government closed the Red Cross centre at Sangatte in November 2002 and now prepares hot meals for camps around Dunkirk, according to the charity.
The performances, which also included helping prepare free hot lunches, largely met with bemusement rather than smiles.
Fifty metres away, smuggling gangs operate openly, selling cigarettes and phone-charging services while plotting launches.
Migrants are dispatched each morning to a hypermarket some 2.7km away and return with trolleys of ingredients for the gangs’ makeshift kitchens, the newspaper reported.
Their latest method involves 15-metre “mega dinghies” capable of carrying up to 230 people in a single crossing, vessels that Quetel described as a “necessary evil”.
“My first feeling was, I was happy that 230 people arrived in one batch without people dying… The second was s—, how can they put them on there,” she said, noting that women and children are often packed into the middle of the overloaded boats.
“And you hear so many horrible stories, you have women and their kids who are separated from their husbands,” the former manager at the Dutch electrical group Philips told The Telegraph.
“So no, I am not happy with those big boats but if they did not have a big boat they could not go anywhere,” she added.
A dinghy carrying 230 people, more than 20 of them children, reached Dover on August 10 in the largest single-boat crossing yet recorded, the French sea rescue service SNSM said.
About 30 of those trying to board fell into the water off the French coast the previous evening, according to the same account.
Home Office figures show 14,526 people arrived in the UK by small boat between January 1 and August 2, 43 per cent fewer than at the same point in 2025.
The 2,316 arrivals recorded in July came on 32 boats, an average of 72 people per vessel and the highest monthly average since the data series began in 2018.
A Home Office spokesperson condemned the “reckless and dangerous tactics” used by the gangs behind the crossings.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said French officers could have stopped a vessel of that size in shallow water and criticised the £660 million (€760 million) Britain is paying Paris to police its coast.
Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, detected some 9,900 attempts to leave the EU for the UK across the Channel between January and April, close to half the number a year earlier, while irregular crossings into the bloc fell 37 per cent over the first half of 2026.
Quetel started performing for migrants under the stage name Clown Holalal during the exodus of Syrian refugees in 2016.
She founded her company Inside Clown in 2012 after training as a hospital clown in the Netherlands and has since worked in migrant camps in Greece, Jordan and Lebanon.
She said: “When I am here, I take a ball and I look at another pair of eyes, I suddenly know there is a communication where I can throw the ball, they take the ball and then I see the human being as an individual. This is a human thing and this is a beautiful thing to see.”
Loon-Plage is largely controlled by criminal gangs and is divided between a section for migrants and aid workers and one for smugglers.
It is infested with rats and there are mounds of rubbish.
There are many incidents of violence, with turf wars between Kurdish and Afghan people-smuggling gangs that include several shootings.
A man in his thirties was shot seven times at the camp on July 28, 2025, a month after a double shooting left two people dead and six wounded, among them a woman and a two-year-old child.
The gangs let aid agencies hand out food, medication, washing facilities and life jackets, and in return expect volunteers to overlook their operations, a well-placed Kurdish source told the newspaper.