Colin Freeman

On Tuesday this week border control cops stopped a van with a shipment of face masks coming through the Channel Tunnel. When they checked the masks they found almost £1 million worth of cocaine tucked in among them. It was a similar story a week earlier. A man called Benjamin Evans was pulled over by the Welsh police on the A40 Brecon bypass. Evans claimed he was a key worker but when the cops searched his car, they discovered nearly £60,000 worth of cocaine. ‘Possession of drugs with intent to supply does not qualify as essential work,’ said the arresting officer.

 Calabar, Nigeria Simon Ngwa is a gentle and polite man, and he apologised to me first for what he was about to say. ‘I’m sorry if this upsets you, but we in Cameroon are very bitter towards Britain,’ he said. ‘As a child, I was taught to look up to the British Crown as a symbol of fair play and the Queen as a guarantor of moral values. But Britain is doing nothing to stop this genocide.’ Mr Ngwa and I had our conversation in a shabby refugee centre in the Nigerian town of Calabar, on Cameroon’s western frontier. Despite his impeccable manners, Mr Ngwa is a wanted man back home in Cameroon. His crime?

Last week, Peregbakumo Oyawerikumo, aka ‘The Master’, was finally caught and shot by the Nigerian army. Oyawerikumo and his Egbesu Boys had styled themselves as local Robin Hoods, taking riches from oil companies in the Niger Delta, but they won’t be much missed. In the remote swamp town of Enekorogha, their demise will be celebrated, because this was the scene of their most notorious crime. It was here, last October, that the Egbesu Boys kidnapped Ian Squire, an optician from Surrey who was working at a clinic, and three fellow Britons: Cambridgeshire GP David Donovan and his wife Shirley, and optometrist Alanna Carson, from Northern Ireland.

James Sackie would make a good frontman for a campaign to help ex-child soldiers. At the age of 17, he was press-ganged into one of Charles Taylor’s juvenile militias. Twenty years on, he talks movingly, in his matter-of-fact pidgin English, about the dreadful things he saw, including the day he had to stop his own baby son, JR, being whisked away as lunch for a general called Eat Human Being. But ask Sackie about Taylor himself and he changes. Taylor is a war hero, not a war criminal, James insists. And if he were freed from his jail cell in Britain, where he’s currently serving 50 years for war crimes, James would welcome him back as leader of Liberia. Not the kind of talk that gets donors reaching for their chequebooks.

A ticket to paradise comes very cheap in Gambia — as long as you’re headed in the right direction. Thomas Cook charges just £230 for the six-hour flight from Gatwick to West Africa, and in the cheaper hotels along the cream-white palm beaches, a week’s stay costs even less. For the 100,000 Europeans who flock here each year — half of them Brits — it’s a much loved, if slightly tatty, African Benidorm, where donkeys can be found not in the souvenir shops but grazing rubbish on the streets outside. For the equally large numbers of Gambians seeking desperately to go the other way, however, the ticket is far pricier.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/defeatingisis/media.mp3" title="Andrew Bacevich and Douglas Murray discuss how ISIS can be crushed" startat=39] Listen [/audioplayer]Last Sunday Isis raised their black flag over Palmyra. Below the flag, in the days that followed, the usual carnage began: beheadings, torture, desecration. Syrian state TV has reported that over 400 civilians have been killed already, and the big question globally has become: how could this have happened? What went wrong with the Iraqi and Syrian troops? Isn’t there anything the West can do? Lord Dannatt, the former head of the army, has called on the British government to ‘think the previously unthinkable’ and send troops.