Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

The last time I talked with The Spectator columnist Jonathan Miller was perhaps ten days ago, just before his unexpected death this week. He had a pre-digital habit, very 1980s, of ringing you up to chat, moan, laugh, explain, badmouth and joke for over an hour at a time. When he rang it always took me a couple of minutes to get reaccustomed to the colder waters of analogue conversation; but then we would have these long rambling discussions that don’t much happen anymore. He’d sent me successive manuscripts of his book, Shock of the News: Confessions of Troublemaker, which he polished and repolished into the version coming out in three weeks’ time .

When asked to define Marine Le Pen in a single word, a majority of French people came up with ‘cats’ rather than ‘extreme-right’. In the past five years, she has worked hard at ‘detoxifying’ her brand. She softened her platform so that she no longer advocates Frexit or even leaving the Euro. Unlike Eric Zemmour, the former Le Figaro columnist, she insisted Islam was compatible with the values of the Republic. It’s Islamism that isn’t, she said.  Having fired her then-85-year-old father for anti-Semitism in 2015, she tried to reshape the old Front National. She changed the party name in 2018 (to Rassemblement National or National Rally).

A photograph, taken in June 2014, has become emblematic of Anne Hidalgo’s Socialist rule of Paris. In the picture stands Queen Elizabeth II, then 88, in Paris to unveil a plaque at the Marché aux Fleurs, near Notre Dame. The Queen, in addition to her usual black handbag, carries her own plastic umbrella. Next to her, the newly-elected mayor, dressed in a cream outfit, has her hands free while a city official holds a large umbrella above her perfect blow-dry. The Spanish-born Hidalgo, 62, now about to announce her candidacy for the 2022 presidential election, is a woman untouched by self-doubt.