Emmanuel macron

After the shale gas vote, I was literally sent to Coventry – to visit the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre. It is a remarkable facility that helps take batteries from development through to production. It means companies only need the hundreds of millions of pounds in investment once they have shown that their product works and is saleable. It was funded by the Faraday Battery Challenge, and I was there to announce a further £221 million of taxpayers’ money. This is one of the rather better ways the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy spends money, while some of our policies seem designed to ruin industry. I am particularly concerned about steel, where the price of energy is, in normal times, about 60 per cent more than our competitors.

While Emmanuel Macron spent Sunday in London honouring the memory of the late Queen Elizabeth, Marine Le Pen marked her return from a summer break with an address to the party faithful in the south of France. Buoyed by the success of the Swedish right in last week’s election, and anticipating a similar result on Sunday when the Italians go to the polls, Le Pen attributed what she called a ‘patriotic wave’ sweeping the continent to the EU’s failure to tackle mass immigration in the last decade. In the opinion of Le Pen no one embodies this failure more than Macron. Last Thursday the president told an assembly of prefects that a new immigration bill would be tabled by his government in early 2023.

So the big guy wants a donnybrook then. It began with Lindsey Graham announcing on Fox News a day or so ago that there will — not may — be “riots in the streets” if Donald Trump is indicted by the Justice Department. Trump then reposted Graham’s remark on his badly failing social media outlet Truth Social, which, like most of his ventures, appears to be headed for bankruptcy, only this time there’s no Papa Trump to show up at the casino to buy a stack of chips to bail out the scapegrace son. Now, Trump has gone on something of an internet bender, indulging his thwarted Twitter impulses by posting over sixty times on Truth Social. If the venture goes belly up, it won’t be because Trump ignored it. As Trump tries to seize the spotlight, the GOP is squirming.

You can’t blame Boris Johnson for jetting off to Kyiv last week for another meet-and-greet session with Volodymyr Zelensky. He got a warmer reception from the Ukrainian President than he would have in Doncaster, the town he snubbed in order to grandstand on the international stage. Johnson was scheduled to have made an appearance at the conference of northern Conservatives, where organisers had hoped he would woo Red Wall voters by explaining how, two and a half years after they loaned him their vote, he intends to ‘level up’ their town. But to the consternation of many MPs, Johnson decided he had more important issues on the other side of Europe with his ‘great friend’ Zelensky.

Tony Blair believes the way forward for Britain is to seek guidance from Emmanuel Macron. The former British prime minister has a reputation for outlandish claims but the suggestion that the United Kingdom can benefit from pearls of wisdom proffered by the most divisive president in the history of the Fifth Republic is baffling even by Blair’s standards. According to Politico, Blair will host a Future of Britain conference on June 30, which is a collaboration between his eponymous Institute and the Britain Project, a centrist think tank that was established in the wake of the 2019 general election and which is described by Politico as the ‘British version of Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche’.