Furious: The Prime Minister was given a dressing down by his own MPs including Philip Davies

David Cameron has been given a humiliating dressing-down by his own MPs over the ‘failure’ to get a grip on immigration.

The Prime Minister was ‘puce-faced’ as Tory MPs queued up to challenge his record on reducing the flow of immigrants into the UK and demand answers to what he was going to do about it.

He was openly contradicted after praising Home Secretary Theresa May for doing a ‘good job’ on the controversial issue.

Outspoken Tory backbencher Philip Davies rounded on Mr Cameron, saying: ‘I don’t think she’s done a good job at all!’

The row came at a private meeting of Tory MPs last week, held amid growing chaos in Calais where migrants are mounting increasingly frantic attempts to board cross-Channel ferries or hide in UK-bound vehicles. It also followed new figures casting doubt on Mr Cameron’s stated ambition to cut net migration to below 100,000 by next May.

Official statistics show net migration (the difference between those arriving in the UK and those leaving) was 243,000 in the year to March, up nearly 70,000 on the previous year.

At the meeting, ex-Minister John Redwood demanded to know ‘what should we now say about our current immigration target?’

And Mr Davies, MP for Shipley in West Yorkshire, made a thinly veiled suggestion that the Prime Minister, MP for well-to-do Witney in Oxfordshire, was out of touch with other parts of the country.

He said: ‘I don’t know about Oxfordshire or Surrey, but where I represent there’s a big problem with immigration. This latest set of figures is disastrous. Why can’t you just tell the public that you cannot control immigration while we’re still in the EU?’

Witnesses said Mr Cameron turned ‘a deep shade of puce’ as Mr Davies spoke.

Crisis: Increasingly desperate migrants have converged on Calais wanting to cross the Channel via the port

A second North of England MP also challenged the Prime Minister. Brigg and Goole MP Andrew Percy told Mr Cameron that immigration was the ‘number one issue’ for local Tory voters.

Number 10 sources last night denied there was a row, adding: ‘These meetings are an important forum to exchange views.’

Meanwhile, former Tory Party leader Michael Howard yesterday warned France that it needed to ‘get its act together’ and deal with asylum seekers in Calais rather than blaming Britain.

The party grandee, Home Secretary from 1993-1997 and now Lord Howard, said the mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, was ‘directing her frustration and her anger at the wrong target’ by demanding that London ‘take responsibility’.

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‘The general principle which every member state of the European Union has subscribed to is that refugees, people fleeing persecution, should apply for asylum in the first safe country they reach,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Calais was last night braced for violence as the town prepared for a march today by French nationalists against the migrants.