Choose Love cutting back Calais funding shows the limits of celebrity philanthropy | Daniel Trilling

Blame not the rich and famous for their charity efforts - but governments for refusing to provide basic aid

Pick a humanitarian emergency in any part of the world, and the needs will seem remarkably consistent. Once people have escaped immediate danger, they need food, shelter, clothing and medical assistance - the things, in other words, that sustain us physically. The most pressing questions are about how to source the items and services required, and how to distribute them effectively.

What determines whether an emergency is resolved quickly or allowed to persist, however, is politics. And if you want to see what happens when political solutions fail, then the scrubland of the northern French coast, just across the Channel from England, is an instructive place to look.