Mark Steyn: You’ll be on your Boris bike while he’s cruising at 30,000 feet en route to cocktails with Greta Thunberg

What a week. If you believe the drivel coming out of COP-26 – or the G-26, as Joe Biden calls it.

Boris Johnson is very concerned about rising sea levels washing away the Maldives in the year 2200. He’s not, last time I checked, Prime Minister of the Maldives.

He’s purportedly the Prime Minister of an entirely different island nation, and he has not the slightest interest in the tide washing up on English shores right now. So far this year almost three times as many quote unquote “migrants” have landed in England as did in the whole of 2020.

This week a record number crossed the Channel in a single day: 853.

If that were to become the norm, that would be a third-of-a-million a year – or about the population of Belfast. I’m not suggesting they should all be resettled there – I have no idea whether they incline toward Sinn Féin or the DUP, but simply in demographic terms the answer to the Irish Question may well be Somalia. I’ll bet Gladstone never saw that coming.

The Mayor of Calais presides over a town ruined by this human tide. She has men dead of hypothermia on her beaches and drowned in overloaded boats. Last night fifty Eritreans bound for the United Kingdom via the SNCF railway track were hit by the Calais-Dunkirk train.

At least one is dead. England is a convenient fifteen-nation stroll from Eritrea, and that Calais mayor, Natacha Bouchart, has no doubt who’s to blame for the traffic.

She says Britain's quote “soft touch” on migrants has inflicted trauma on Calais residents for over 20 years by luring an unending torrent of human misery to one French port town that is the gateway to free housing and free money in what she calls the El Dorado of England. El Dorado is the mythical city of gold.

We’re not quite there yet, but, as Priti Patel has said, these so-called asylum seekers just want to live in British hotels. Which are a bit hit and miss in my experience, but probably compare reasonably favourably with the Eritrea Holiday Inn.

The point is we’re gonna need a lot more hotels. At COP-26, Boris is gonna have to kick some of those African dictators out of their presidential suites to make room for the guys from back home fleeing their beneficent rule.

853 quote-unquote “refugees” per day is about half the number of all babies born in England and Wales that day, which averages currently at about 1,682. So you might think that’s good news, given the collapsed Anglo-Celtic fertility rate. Evidently a lot of young women and young men – I don’t want to be transphobic – are reluctant to give the ol’ birth canal a workout and might find it more appealing simply to adopt a strapping young lad or lassie wading ashore at Folkestone.

Except that 87 per cent of all the quote-unquote “refugees” are male. Under the Geneva Convention on refugees, all of these young men have a reasonable fear of persecution if they were to be returned to their homeland, or indeed to any of the 27 countries they passed through between here and their homeland.

Their homeland is no place for young men – but apparently everything’s hunky-dory for their sisters, girlfriends, wives, mothers, grandmas, and baby daughters. When civil war breaks out, toss your machete to Auntie as you head for the door and leave it to her.

So, on this week’s numbers, Britain is going to wind up with a greater male-female demographic imbalance than China after forty years of its one-child policy. Guys who can’t get any action is not a recipe for social tranquility. If you’re a young lady in, say, Rotherham, you might want to buy a new pair of running shoes.

Let me go back to the Mayor of Calais. Mme Bouchart thinks UK law is nuts and incentivises this great tide of humanity. She says quote: “The British Government does not have the courage to review its legislation.”

She’s right. It IS a question of courage. All these chaps are going to be staying, permanently, and running up the room-service tab because, as in Rotherham, no one wants to take the heat of being called racist by drawing attention to it.

That’s why Boris is off in Glasgow saving the planet. Because saving the planet is easier; it’s the soft option. Why you would want lessons in saving the planet from a guy who lives on an island and can’t control his borders at a time of global pandemic is beyond me. But, if you ask the political class about enforcing the national frontier, they’ll say, oh, very difficult, old boy, lots of complicating factors, entirely unreasonable to expect us to do anything about it... But recalibrating the global climate, changing the very heavens, THAT we can do.”

Saving the planet is where politicians go to preen and posture because they’re useless about the things that are their actual responsibility like saving your country, saving your county, saving your town... COP-26 is being held in Glasgow, which has the lowest male life expectancy in Western Europe.

All these prime ministers and celebrities yakking it up are just two miles from Calton, where, as the WHO pointed out a few years back, male life expectancy was 53.9 years, which is a smidge higher than the Central African Republic, whose numbers were depressed for many years by the cannibal Emperor Bokassa having quite an appetite. But saving Calton lacks the glamour of saving the planet, doesn’t it?

What’s the best way to save the planet? Well, why not get a sitcom actor from the American adaptation of “The Office” to fly in an iceberg to melt all over the floor of the COP-26 conference? That’s how bad global warming is, folks.

You can have your interior decorator install an iceberg in the living room of your Tuscany holiday home and next thing you know it’s dripping all over the parquet.

Speaking of large inert lumps dripping all over the floor, Boris Johnson is being berated for taking a private plane to have dinner at the Garrick Club with Charles Moore. Charles was my editor at the Telegraph and Boris was my editor at The Spectator and so I’m understandably bitter and resentful that I wasn’t invited.

But this is the world our leaders are making for you: you’ll be on your Boris Bike pedaling through streets of human misery while he’s cruising at 30,000 feet for cocktails with Greta Thunberg. As the Mayor of Calais says, what’s missing is courage.