France

Friday

Stephen Daisley

It’s time for Boris to turn back the Channel migrant boats

From our UK edition

There is a sentence in the latest BBC report on English Channel migrant crossings that is just exquisite. Thursday saw 1,000 people arrive in Britain unauthorised — a new record — and the story on the Corporation’s website explains how UK Border Force boats, as well as lifeboats, ferried the arrivals to Dover. However, it added: ‘A Whitehall source accused France of losing control of the situation.’ It’s a line worthy of Swift. Britain is seeing record levels of illegal migration, the Home Office is running a maritime Uber service, and somehow it’s all the French’s fault. Some wonder why the Boris Johnson era hasn’t produced any great political satire but who could take the competition?

Wednesday

Cockburn

WATCH: Kamala Harris adopts bizarre French accent in Paris

“Every man has two countries — his own and France.” A variation of this line, frequently misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, came to Cockburn as he saw the latest footage from Kamala Harris’s trip to Paris. Everyone, he realized, has two accents — his own and French. And so it is with Momala. On a Tuesday tour of the Pasteur Institute, the vice president opted for a very Fraaanch pronunciation in her conversation with zee scientistes. See for yourself: https://twitter.com/AmericaRising/status/1458489403513491460 Now, Cockburn readily admits that Harris’s Franglais (or should that be Framerican?) is a little more subtle than his own garbled intonation when asking for directions on the Riviera.

french

Tuesday

Matt Purple

Kamala in Paris

Ah, the French. Is there any other people Americans so love to antagonize? Recall that after France (rightly) decided to abstain from the Iraq war in 2003, we didn't just express our discontent; we introduced the term "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" into the Kissingerian lexicon. We then canceled French fries, which are Belgian. Call it a sibling rivalry between children of the Enlightenment; call it a clash between social democracy and rugged individualism. Whatever you call it, just don't go canceling a submarine agreement at the last minute for the love of God. That's what Joe Biden did last month when Australia suddenly nixed a plan to purchase subs from the French in favor of American and British vessels. And stop the presses! A conspiracy of the Anglophones was afoot!

Friday

Jonathan Miller

Is Eric Zemmour running or not?

From our UK edition

Eric Zemmour, the right-wing journalist and self-declared populist, is at a crossroads. Will he or won’t he declare himself a presidential candidate? Few doubt he will declare. Timing is an issue. Some in his camp think he should delay declaring as long as possible. But executing an effective launch will be more important than its timing. He’s under concerted attack by political and media allies of President Emmanuel Macron. Yet his ability to rapidly respond, to perform opposition research of his own, to build a ground campaign, remains constrained. Is he really ready to mount a presidential election campaign, which will be considerably more demanding, costly and tricky than his current so-called book tour?

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Fishing for votes: what’s really behind our trade war with France?

From our UK edition

A decade ago, French-bashing was all the rage. David Cameron famously declared Britain would ‘roll out the red carpet’ for those fleeing the steep tax hikes proposed by the newly elected Socialist president François Hollande. The French economy continued to be a source of derision for the British, culminating in the managing director of John Lewis describing it as ‘sclerotic, hopeless and downbeat’ in October 2014. The following month, Hollande despatched his 37-year-old English-speaking economy minister to London with instructions to prove to the British that the French economy was in good health. That minister was Emmanuel Macron.

Dot Wordsworth

The real ‘scallop’ war: how do you pronounce it?

From our UK edition

‘You say scallops and I say scallops,’ sang my husband in his best Ginger Rogers accents. Since we both pronounce the bivalve to rhyme with dollop, there was a certain lack of contrast. There has been a scallop war with France in past days. Though both French and English enjoy them on the plate, it is the French in the 15th century who provided us with the name, escalope. We just knocked the beginning off the word. Our cockle too, from at least a century earlier, is from the French word that gives them coquilles St Jacques. (Mussel is from Latin musculus, ‘muscle’, which also gave the word mus, ‘mouse’, from the obvious resemblance.) The scallop shell was an ideal emblem, easy to find at Santiago de Compostela, for pilgrims to pin on their coats.

Bruce Anderson

Is it worth gambling on supermarket wine bargains?

From our UK edition

Rich men often look out for bargains. I suppose that is why they are rich. But there can be problems. Occasionally bargains fail to live up to their name. It would not be easy to find a single bottle of le Montrachet for £600, yet a friend of mine once bought a whole case for that sum. He forgot the wise old adage: ‘If something sounds too good to be true, it is probably neither.’ Not one of his 12 bottles turned out to be drinkable. On a lesser scale, my friend Geoffrey fell victim to Waitrose. He and Louise invited me to lunch and the pièce de résistance was boeuf bourguignon. Before that, there was a brief tasting. ‘Try this,’ he said, proffering a glass as I arrived. Judging by his tone, it was not going to be a treat.

Robert Peston

Why I didn’t get a hug at COP26

From our UK edition

COP26 is not your typical power summit, because world leaders, NGOs and hacks are all in the same scrum. Outside their gilded fortresses politicians reveal different habits. John Kerry has the most purposeful stride, eyes rigid to the front, refusing to acknowledge the melee. Macron gives an impromptu press conference at the drop of a hat: he always has an articulate opinion to share, though his macho minders manhandle anyone who gets a little too close. Trudeau is predictably generous with his flirtatious smile. And Modi is the most huggy, which I hadn’t anticipated. He hugs everyone. Except me. I was particularly struck by his warm embrace of Luxembourg’s PM, Bettel.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Fishing friction, Greta’s singalong and terror in Tokyo

From our UK edition

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told delegates to the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26) in Glasgow: ‘It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock and we need to act now.’ He left the conference the next day. British companies would have to publish plans on reaching net zero by 2050. India said it would reach net zero by 2070. Greta Thunberg, aged 18, stood in Govan Festival Park leading a chorus of ‘You can shove your climate crisis up your arse’ to the tune of ‘Ye cannae shove yer grannie aff a bus’.

Wednesday

Jonathan Miller

Did Macron win the Brexit fish war?

From our UK edition

Who is winning the fish war? Will gentlemen in England still a-bed think themselves accursed they were not there? This morning, the war looked rather, forgive me, fishy. France has suspended until Thursday its threats to disrupt the Channel Tunnel. Boris declared he would make no concessions. His bellicose promise came immediately after the UK and Channel Islands handed the French 100 more fishing permits. Maybe it will hot up. Maybe not. French-bashing is flourishing at least. Jacob Rees-Mogg has pronounced the French to be always grumpy in October, the anniversary of Agincourt and Trafalgar. And he’s being predictably reflected in Brit-bashing from Paris, dragging out the Marquis de Ximenès’s complaint about perfidious Albion.

Gavin Mortimer

France must ensure the safety of Eric Zemmour

From our UK edition

There are several similarities between Eric Zemmour and the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, and one distinct difference. The Dutchman was homosexual and an ardent campaigner for gay rights, whereas the Frenchman, who has three children, recently reaffirmed his opposition to gay marriage. But on Islam and immigration they had much in common. Fortuyn, for example, campaigned for a reduction in the overall annual number of immigrants to Holland from 40,000 to 10,000, with not one Muslim among that figure. Zemmour wants an end to all immigration and believes that Islam ‘is not compatible with France’. Fortuyn paid with his life for his views. He was assassinated on May 6, 2002, nine days before the Dutch parliamentary elections.

Monday

Katy Balls

Is Britain heading for a full-blown fish war with France?

From our UK edition

As the COP26 summit gets underway, a diplomatic Brexit row is escalating on the sidelines of the conference over fish. After France threatened to block British boats from its ports and increase checks on vessels over a disagreement on fishing licences, the UK warned it could retaliate if France goes through with it. Suggestions from the French over the weekend that a solution in the form of 'practical operational measures' had been found were quickly shot down by the UK side. With a French election looming, Macron can be expected to do more not less of this This morning, Liz Truss doubled down – using a morning media round to say the UK is prepared to take legal action against France.

John Keiger

Macron is following in the failed footsteps of the wrong Napoleon

From our UK edition

Is Emmanuel Macron turning into Emperor Napoleon III? Not the great Napoleon who conquered Europe and was eventually defeated by a British-led coalition at Waterloo and exiled to Saint Helena in the south Atlantic. But his lesser nephew, whose obsession with his uncle’s glory drove him to flatulent demagoguery at home, grandiose schemes abroad and humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870.  Under the last monarch of France, the country descended into the revolutionary Commune, was amputated of Alsace-Lorraine and prostrated before a united and all-powerful Germany. The lesser Napoleon was eventually deposed, vilified and outlawed to Chislehurst, outside London.

Wednesday

Andrew Garfield

Why Britain and France can’t have an amicable divorce

From our UK edition

Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson famously said that the National Health Service is the nearest thing we British have to a state religion. You could say much the same thing about the European Union and the French. To our Gallic neighbours, the ‘construction of Europe’ is a sacred task that brooks no challenge. What goal can be higher than binding the once bellicose German nation into a new rules-based European order that has brought peace to a continent riven by war and revolution? What nobler cause for France than leveraging the outsized economic heft of its neighbour outre-Rhin in support of its mission to create an alternative beacon of enlightenment values to counter that tawdry Anglo-Saxon economic and cultural hegemony?

Monday

Jonathan Miller

Macron’s pointless fish war

From our UK edition

During the now virtually forgotten cod wars between Iceland and the United Kingdom from 1958 to 1976, the diminutive foreign office official Sir Donald Maitland invited to King Charles Street for a dressing down the Icelandic Ambassador, a 6’7” Nordic giant. When the ambassador arrived, Sir Donald climbed on to his massive desk, drew himself up to be eye-to-eye with his visitor and declared: ‘I have been instructed to deliver this from the highest level.’ The moral of this story is, if you wish to avoid seeming ridiculous, avoid fish wars. Ultimately, little is at stake. Outcomes are frequently embarrassing. There will inevitably be terrible tabloid jokes about herrings and floundering, et cetera ad infinitum.

Gavin Mortimer

Zemmour’s xenophobia

From our UK edition

The received opinion is that Islam and immigration are Éric Zemmour's prime targets as his putative presidential campaign gathers pace. But he has a third mortal enemy, and that's the Anglophone world. Éric doesn't much like us. But then Éric doesn't much like anyone who's not, as his sort are wont to say, Français de souche. Zemmour's rabble-rousing is becoming tiresome. He is lashing out in all directions, his latest act of belligerence a swipe at Britain and America during a rally in Rouen on Friday. The English, he thundered, have been France's 'greatest enemies for a thousand years' while D-Day 'was an enterprise of liberation but also of occupation and colonisation by the Americans'.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Plan Z: the rise of Éric Zemmour

From our UK edition

The fact that Éric Zemmour hasn’t yet declared himself a candidate in next year’s French presidential election is a bit of a joke. A Harris poll last week put him on 17 per cent, ahead of all other rivals to President Emmanuel Macron. And he’s holding rallies across France at which adoring fans in ‘Zemmour 2022’ T-shirts chant: ‘Zemmour! Président!’ He’s still pretending to be a TV personality on a big book promotion tour. But Mr Z is running and everybody knows it. He has a devoted and surprisingly professional campaign behind him, the nucleus of a political party, conceived with a clear mission: to restore la gloire de la France.

Jonathan Miller

My night in Béziers with Zemmour

From our UK edition

Béziers is the ancient winemaking capital of the Occitanie region in the deep south of France and a stronghold of the French right. Its popular mayor, Robert Ménard, a former journalist, was elected as an independent, but with a strong endorsement from Marine Le Pen. Her political movement, the Rassemblement National, formerly the National Front, with historical roots in anti-Semitism, has been powerful here for decades. So is it paradoxical, bizarre, or perhaps evidence of a more profound shift of social and political tectonic plates, that last Saturday night thousands of Biterrois turned out at the Zinga Zanga theatre to cheer Éric Zemmour, a Parisian Jewish intellectual, author and television and radio journalist?

Wednesday

Jonathan Miller

Who do you think you are kidding Mr Barnier?

From our UK edition

Michel Barnier is running for president of France as a Eurosceptic. He’s talking about pulling back powers to the French state and installing ‘a sovereign shield’ to allow France to impose its own immigration policy. But he’s about as credible as a vegan crocodile. Barnier was at the scene of the crime when the French voted (by a 55 per cent majority) in 2005 to reject the treaty establishing a new European constitution. In a great betrayal of democracy, voters were simply ignored and the government signed the document anyway, relabeled as the Lisbon Treaty.

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

The idiotic myth of the ‘lone wolf’ attack

From our UK edition

In the summer of 2020 the French Senate published a report on the ‘Development of Islamist Radicalisation and the means of combatting it.’ It was a wide-ranging review which included contributions from academics, writers, Muslim associations and politicians. Among those interviewed by the commission were the ex-security advisor Alexandre del Valle, Zineb El Rhazoui, a former columnist for Charlie Hebdo and Hugo Micheron, a doctor in political science, and the author of a 2020 book entitled The French Jihadism. The French Jihadism should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the nature of the threat posed by Islamic extremism – not just in France but across the West. Micheron interviewed 80 jihadists serving time for terror offences in French prisons.