Thirty people climbed onto the inflatable that night near Loon-Plage. Sixteen were Kurds from Iraqi Kurdistan - ten men, four women, two children. Four more were Afghan men fleeing the Taliban's return that summer. Three were Ethiopian. One Kurdish man came from Iran, one woman was Somali, one man Vietnamese, one Egyptian. Among the victims were two children, the youngest only seven years old. A pregnant woman was on board. They had paid smugglers between three and seven thousand euros each for a place on a boat too cheap to be safe. Twenty-seven bodies were eventually recovered. One man, Mohammed Shekha Ahmad, remains officially missing. Only two people survived, both clinging to the deflating raft until a French fishing trawler finally reached them in the morning.

The dinghy left the French coast in the late afternoon of 23 November. By the small hours of 24 November it was in trouble. The floor had split. Cold seawater poured in. People began to call for help - eighteen times to French emergency numbers, according to the later French inquiry. Records of the calls are devastating. "You will not be saved," one French operator told a caller, in a phrase later quoted across France. The French told callers they were in British waters and should call the British. The British told callers they were in French waters and should call the French. A Dover fisherman watching from the Kent side later told The Telegraph that fifteen to twenty French fishing vessels were within reach of the dying boat that night and none responded. The dinghy drifted, deflating, between the two jurisdictions all night long.

An Independent investigation, working from later official documents, put it bluntly: it took the UK and French coastguards twelve hours to respond to the first mayday call. The Guardian and Liberty Investigates found that in the days leading up to the disaster, around 440 migrants in nineteen separate boats had been reported in difficulty in UK waters with no rescue dispatched - a pattern of inaction that experts told the paper appeared to breach international law. When boats from HM Coastguard at Dover and Border Force vessel BF Hurricane finally arrived in mid-morning, almost everyone was already dead - drowned or killed by hypothermia in water that hovered just above ten degrees. The French inquiry, published in November 2022, was so damning that nine people, including five French navy personnel, were eventually charged with failing to render assistance.

By the time of the disaster, 25,700 people had already crossed the Channel in small boats that year - up from a few hundred two years earlier. Tighter security on the lorries that used the Channel Tunnel had pushed people into inflatables instead. Politicians argued the cause: Brexit, the Le Touquet agreement, criminal smugglers, the UK's refusal to open a safe route for asylum seekers from France. The Calais MP Pierre-Henri Dumont blamed Boris Johnson. The European Commission noted, dryly, that the slogan of the Brexit campaign had been "take back control," and that control of the border now belonged to the United Kingdom alone. None of that mattered to Maryam Nuri Mohamed Amin's fiance, who learned she was dead through a Kurdish news network. He told reporters he kept watching the video she had sent.

The French novelist Vincent Delecroix wrote a short, harrowing book about that night - Small Boat, a transcript of the emergency calls reconstructed as fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize. The book changed nothing on the water. People still leave the French coast in cheap inflatables for England. Some still drown. The Channel is twenty-one miles wide at the Strait of Dover - one of the busiest waterways on earth, with hundreds of cargo ships, ferries, and tankers passing each day in the great traffic-separation lanes overhead. From the air it looks almost banal: a grey slot of water between two coastlines. The people who died that night were within sight of land in both directions. They drowned because nobody who could see them decided it was their job to act.