BBC Radio 4 has a prophet in its midst. Either that or the scheduling of Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated into English by Helen Stevenson and narrated by Lydia Wilson – two weeks after the Home Secretary announced sweeping restrictions to the UK’s asylum policy – is an eerie coincidence. Shabana Mahmood wants to deter migrants from crossing the Channel to try to reach the UK’s shores in overcrowded dinghies. Small Boat is about what happens when they do – or, rather, did.
On 24 November 2021, 27 people drowned when their dinghy sank, including three children. Small Boat – a work of fiction inspired by real reports and transcripts – takes as its protagonist the French navy radio operator who received their distress calls and failed to send help. “I didn’t ask you to leave,” she is recorded telling the drowning migrants.
How can a person whose job it is to save lives at sea display such callousness? The genius of Delecroix’s writing and Wilson’s phenomenal performance – at once brashly defiant and torn up by guilt – is that it gives a maddeningly simple answer: all too easily. We hear in detail the call operator’s self-justifications for declining to dispatch a rescue boat no matter how many times she is called. Some are compelling (the dinghy was heading for English waters; there were other vessels to assist and not enough resources). Others, captured in her off-the-cuff remarks expressing disdain that the migrants have set off in the first place, decidedly less so. Sometimes, her apparent lack of remorse shatters. The biscuit crumbs bobbing in her coffee become inflatable dinghies, the room where French police are interrogating her for negligence begins to flood.
This is a story about empathy – which our narrator calls “an idiotic luxury indulged in by people who do nothing and who are moved by the spectacle of suffering”. Empathy for those whose lives are so broken they feel they must risk the crossing, and for the people whose job it is to rescue them, night after treacherous night. I wonder if the Home Office will listen in.
[Further reading: The House at Number 48 is a gripping tale of real-life history]
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This article appears in the 26 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Last Stand