None of us should mourn the end of the Jungle. For the past two years, the migrant camp in Calais has been a symbol of Europe’s utter failure to deal with the challenge of mass migration.

Almost every day has brought heart-breaking stories about the plight of the children incarcerated behind the Jungle’s security fences, and appalling revelations about the high levels of crime, abuse and disease.

The makeshift shacks and piles of rubbish, the hungry, hollow-eyed children and masked riot policemen have been a terrible stain on the image of our continent.

Au revoir: Britain and France should be united in saying good riddance to the Jungle

There has been a migrant camp near Calais since 1999 but now the slum, which became known as the Jungle, is being wiped off the face of the Earth

But it is, I think, immensely revealing that even in its final days, the Jungle has been the cause of so much bitterness between London and Paris.

Indeed, you could hardly find a better example of the jealousy with which the French elite view their northern neighbours or the sanctimonious hypocrisy with which they love to disguise their chauvinistic self-interest.

Disgraceful as it is, the Jungle has never really been a British problem.

Despite all the weeping and wailing of visiting celebrities such as Lily Allen — who took it upon herself to apologise on behalf of the British people — the camp was built on French soil and guarded by French policemen under French law.

It is often said that the camp’s migrant population, 7,000 at its peak, were desperate to get to London and other parts of the UK. But what were they doing there in the first place?

Riot police protect firefighters who move into the Jungle as flames rise in the background tonight

Refugees are supposed to apply for asylum in the first EU country they enter, so why do they wait until they get to France, or hope to get into Britain and then claim asylum?

A migrant walks past one of the shacks which has been sent over. Only a small number of migrants are still in the Jungle

Under the Dublin Convention, refugees are supposed to apply for asylum in the first EU country they enter.

They really ought to have claimed asylum as soon as they arrived in Europe — in Italy, Greece or Hungary. And at the very least, as soon as they entered France.

But the French authorities effectively colluded to dismantle the Dublin Convention, waving the migrants through until they got to Calais.

Instead of offering these desperate people the succour they needed, they threw them into camps and expected Britain to sort it out.

The appalling costs of this callous approach have been clear for the past two years.

The rapes, robberies and squalid conditions were the inevitable result of a French policy that treated the migrants not as human beings, but as an unpleasant problem to be dumped on London’s doorstep.

To add insult to injury, the French are expecting us to pay for their mistakes.

Over the next three years, British taxpayers face a total bill of £118 million to clear the Jungle site, erect a new security fence at the Port of Calais and pay private security firms to patrol the ports of northern France.

This does not exactly strike me as a monument to Gallic goodwill. But that seems in very short supply these days.

Patriotic: Should we be proud that this refugee in the Jungle is waving a British flag?

In the past few months, the favourites to challenge the floundering Francois Hollande in next year’s presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy and Alain Juppé, have been engaged in a competition as to who could most unpleasantly bash the British.

It says something, I think, about the state of French politics that such desperately discredited characters are serious candidates for the presidency in 2017.

Mr Juppé, almost incredibly, has a conviction for the abuse of public funds and was a notably flaccid prime minister back in the mid-Nineties.

Mr Sarkozy’s prominence in French political life, meanwhile, is simply baffling.

Given his record — the disaster of his last presidential term, the endless scandals, the ludicrous posturing with his wife Carla and the naked corruption — how on earth can he expect anyone to take him seriously?

Perhaps their weakness explains why both men have tried to whip up support by turning Britain into a scapegoat.

For instance, Mr Juppé and Mr Sarkozy have threatened to scrap the Le Touquet agreement, under which British officials can check passports of refugees on French soil.

Last week, when asked if the Anglo-French border needed moving to Kent, Mr Juppé said: ‘Of course. Don’t tell me that it’s difficult because the British don’t want it.’

The best the French have to offer? The Mayor of Bordeaux, Alain Juppé (pictured, centre), is now odds-on favourite to win the presidency next year but his record is not good

Never mind that it was Mr Sarkozy who originally signed the Le Touquet agreement. The posturing French politicians don’t seem to care about that.

Never mind that scrapping the agreement would almost certainly be a disaster for travellers crossing the Channel, leading to huge queues and long delays at St Pancras, Folkestone and Dover, and would force our Government to set up migrant camps on the south coast of England.

But their attitude to the Jungle is also symptomatic of a deeper tendency. Just look at how the French elite have tried to turn the Brexit referendum to their advantage, casting Britain as a selfish villain to be cut down to size.

In the past two weeks alone, the French finance minister, Michel Sapin, has made a shameless bid to lure international banks from London, while the city of Paris even paid for a ludicrous series of posters at Heathrow and St Pancras.

‘Tired of the Fog? Try the Frogs!’ reads the slogan.

As it happens, fog (or more correctly smog) has not been an issue in London since the Fifties. But since the French elite’s political and economic attitudes are about 60 years out of date, perhaps it was an understandable mistake.

Rather more disturbing, though, was the message from President Hollande when a journalist asked him about the Brexit negotiations.

He's back: Nicolas Sarkozy (pictured during the 2012 campaign, which he lost) is determined to make a comeback

‘There must be a threat, there must be a risk, there must be a price,’ he said, warning Britain could face serious ‘economic and human consequences’.

Have a look at those words again: ‘threat’, ‘risk’, ‘price’.

Not quite the rhetoric you associate with the traditional entente cordiale, is it?

The truth, unfortunately, is France’s old resentments — so deeply rooted in the profound sense of humiliation and failure that inevitably followed the experience of defeat and occupation in World War II — have never gone away.

Indeed, inside France’s governing class — an elite so narrow, corrupt and clapped out they make our own leaders look like political titans — a paranoid suspicion of all things Anglo-Saxon is practically de rigueur.

The founding father of modern French politics, Charles de Gaulle, never forgave the British for saving his country.

Like so many Frenchmen, he was only too conscious of the cowardice and incompetence that had disfigured his country’s war effort, as well as their shameful record of collusion in the Holocaust.

It was this fundamental Anglophobia, based on jealousy and humiliation, that inspired de Gaulle to veto Britain’s applications to join what was then the Common Market in 1963 and 1967.

If we had joined, of course, we might have been able to steer it towards a more coherent future as a free-trade alliance of nation states. As it was, we joined too late to make a difference.

But behind all this lies a deeper history.

It is telling that the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, made a futile bid last week to have the Brexit talks conducted entirely in French, because the language issue cuts to the heart of France’s historic failure.

Three centuries ago, French was the language of international trade and diplomacy

and France was the world’s greatest power. But, since then, it has been downhill all the way.

Humiliated time and again on the battlefield, overtaken economically by the British and the Germans, reduced to a virtual cultural backwater, the French have watched in horror as the world turned to English instead.

You don’t need French to get ahead in business, science or computing. But you won’t get anywhere without English.

Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that like jealous schoolgirls competing with a more admired rival, the French are so determined to fight their petty battles and score their cheap little points. And perhaps we should not be too surprised or even too cross. For as the wartime newsreels famously put it at a time when our neighbours were busy brushing up on their German, Britain can take it.

The tragedy, though, is that the real losers from all this have been those least able to take it — by which I mean the cold and hungry migrants whom the French incarcerated in the Jungle.

They surely hoped for better when they entered the land of liberty, equality and fraternity.