Emmanuel macron

Why is Emmanuel Macron raging against Britain? The French president has returned to the subject of the British once again in the course of his Great National Debate. To be honest, thus far this has been something of a great Macron soliloquy, as he finds it difficult to stop talking. It was inevitable that during one of his lengthy televised discourses (there have now been three) he would turn once again to his new favourite subject, and so he did.

I spend most of my time drawing politicians, trying to work out what makes them distinctive. The eyes, the expression, their mood: it’s all about finding people’s peculiarities and accentuating them. When I started, I’d focus on the face. Everything else was an afterthought. It wasn’t until I came across a drawing by the Norwegian cartoonist Finn Graff – a cartoon of Helmut Kohl, I think – that I realised what I had been missing. How much you can tell from someone’s shoes. I didn’t discover this, so much as rediscover it. When I was a teenager, I worked in a shoe shop in my home town of Arendal, Norway. I used to challenge myself to identify the right shoe for a customer the moment they walked in.

The eminent historian Emmanuel Todd was on the radio in France last week. He had much to say, none of which would have made for easy listening at the Élysée Palace, particularly his warning that Emmanuel Macron is facing a coup d'etat that has been fomenting for years. Todd believes that fundamental to the rise of the Yellow Vest movement is what happened in 2005. That was the year France, in the words of the Guardian at the time, "decisively rejected the new European constitution". The 'non' votes were 54 per cent (out of an overall turnout of almost 70 per cent) and jubilant campaigners demanded the resignation of Jacques Chirac as they celebrated in the Place de la Bastille.

When Emmanuel Macron won a resounding victory over far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French presidential elections – claiming 66 per cent of the vote – Matteo Salvini was a little known Italian politician largely scoffed at as a clown by the status-quo parties. While Salvini was posting selfies on Facebook and making outlandish comments about North African migrants, the eurozone, the European Union, and the Italian political establishment, Macron was in Paris measuring drapes in the Élysée Palace. Stories in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Guardian gushing about Macron being Europe’s saviour from the dark forces of populism were as prevalent as stories deriding Salvini as a buffoon.

A new interior minister. A new agriculture and culture minister. There wasn’t, despite some speculation, a new prime minister, but there will be lots of new fresh faces around the cabinet table. France’s dynamic young president Emmanuel Macron has finally re-launched his government after a wave of resignations in a bid to kick-start phase two of his term of office, restore some order to an increasingly chaotic administration, and, probably not co-incidentally, to rescue his tumbling poll ratings. The trouble is, his real problem is not the team around him. Nor is it his style, or resistance to his reforms, although both might cause controversy. In fact, it is becoming painfully obvious that France’s real problem is the euro.

Every so often, usually on Twitter, you hear calls for a new centrist party. The Tories have gone Brexit bonkers, runs the argument, and Labour hard-left – surely most people are in the middle? And look at Emmanuel Macron: by sheer self-belief he won the presidency and leads a majority parliamentary party that did not exist three years ago. So don’t we need a new centrist force in Britain? I’m not sure that we do, and I explain why in my Daily Telegraph column today. Let’s look at Macron, and what he’s trying to do. Reject high taxes for the rich, on the pragmatic grounds that they don’t raise revenue.