Emmanuel macron

How nice it would be, in this season of good cheer, to find something hopeful to say. Being a historian, I shall try: history often helps us to see our problems in proportion. But let us grit our teeth and begin with the depressing news. Worst is the sudden emergence — or re-emergence? — of an unusually angry division within our politics and society. A large part of the political class, and seemingly a sizeable proportion of the country’s educated elite, have distanced themselves from the majority of the country. Never in modern times has there been such an overt and even contemptuous attempt to deny the legitimacy of a popular vote.

I have come to Greece in search of sanity over Brexit. Ostensibly it is a symposium to discuss relations between Britain and Greece. But it is also an excuse to step away from the minutiae of the negotiations to think about the future of Europe. It was from Greece, of course, that our continent derived its name — from the mythological Europa who was ravished by Zeus and bore a future king of Crete. One contributor notes dryly that Greece is also not a bad place to think about the rise and fall of empires, the follies of politicians, the failings of institutions and what happens to elites when they become obsessed by Byzantine theological detail. The EU has no monopoly on schism.

The labour market would be revolutionised. France would start growing rapidly again, leading the way in Europe. Tech entrepreneurs would flock to Paris, along with the bankers fleeing the City, while companies from around the world would be relocating to newly invigorated industrial hubs in Lyon and Toulouse. That anyway was the script when the centrist reformer Emmanuel Macron was elected to the French Presidency. Today we saw what the Macron revolution would actually amount to as his government finally unveiled his major set of labour market reforms. Predictably enough the major trade unions have already said they will oppose it, and the riot police will no doubt be standing by with their water cannons and batons as he tries to get the package through Parliament.

There has been an unprecedented development this year in the Islamists' war on the West. For the first time their foot soldiers are singling out women to kill. Women have been the victims of terrorism before, murdered by paramilitary organisations such as ETA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the IRA, because of their uniform or their beliefs, or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but never solely because of their sex. In the era when Islamic terror groups hijacked aircraft it was rare that women were harmed. When a Trans World Airlines jet was hijacked in 1985, for example, the terrorists released all the women and children, including the Americans.

On this week’s episode we discuss whether Macron is losing his gloss, ask if the Brexit talks are heading in the right direction, and recommend how to get the best out of the Edinburgh festival. First, it’s been just over two months since Emmanuel Macron became President of France, and already cracks are starting to show. Swept into the Elysee Palace by a sea of young voters rejecting Marine Le Pen and the National Front, those same voters are beginning to turn on the centrist former banker who they reluctantly championed. So says Gavin Mortimer in this week’s magazine, where he laments the new President’s vanity, and he joins the podcast from Paris along with the political journalist, Marie Le Conte.

When Theresa May invited Donald Trump to London, shortly after his inauguration, the howls of the bien-pensant commentariat could be heard from Islington to Brighton. Yet when Emmanuel Macron invited the American president to Paris to stand by his side on Bastille Day, there was barely a peep. How to explain this? Sophie Pedder, Paris editor of the Macron-infatuated Economist, was quick off the mark. Macron, she announced, had extended his invitation to Trump from a position of strength and credibility. ‘May has neither.’ The Elysée press office could not have expressed it more viciously.

Having worked flat-out to defend judges over the Article 50 case in the Supreme Court, the BBC has gone the other way, in relation to the judiciary, over Grenfell Tower. Its news coverage is working hard to displace the retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick from his appointment to chair the inquiry into the fire. Groups purporting to speak for the Grenfell victims are given airtime to denounce him. The idea is that they and their activist lawyers are entitled to a veto on who runs any inquiry, thus attaining effective control of what it decides. Something similar led to the hopeless, expensive collapse of chairman after chairman in Theresa May’s misguided independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. This is not in the public interest.