It threatened to be a major diplomatic incident; the telephone wires were burning hot between the Foreign Office and Paris this week as dastardly French gendarmes 'kidnapped' a young Briton working on the Channel Tunnel and threatened to send him off into the army.
It brought back all the old Cold War imagery, of someone being snatched across a border, disappearing into the night. Except that this did not involve the former Soviet Union or intrigue at Checkpoint Charlie but the more mundane territory of a Channel Tunnel terminal.
No matter how sophisticated a country may believe itself to be, there is something in the nasty side of a national psyche which relishes the idea of dealing in xenophobic stereotypes.
Coincidentally while Britain was amazed at a group of young Russians who climbed into hidden compartments beneath a Eurotunnel train travelling at 300 kilometres an hour to try to enter Britain illegally, this drama was taking place in the opposite direction.
French police seized a young man who thought himself British, dragged him back through the tunnel and accused him of dodging national service.
The episode dragged out every stereotypical reaction it is possible to conceive.
Henry Tuson, a 23-year-old translator for Eurotunnel, who works at its Folkestone terminal in England, was seized as he walked through the small area within which French passport officers work on English soil.
