Gavin Mortimer

If there is one place to avoid this week it is Normandy. The global elite are in town to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day. Along with as many as 25 world leaders there will be upwards of 12,000 of their security staff invading this normally sleepy part of Northern France. In addition, 43,000 gendarmes, police and military personnel will be deployed on land, sea and in the air. A restricted traffic zone will be place throughout the region, and residents are being advised to stay at home on Thursday and Friday. Some schools will be closed on those days because of the disruption.

New Caledonia must not become the ‘Wild West’ declared Emmanuel Macron last week during his flying visit to the Pacific Island. For two weeks the indigenous people, the Kanaks, have been in revolt against a voting reform they believe will marginalise them. The French President’s visit achieved little. Not long after Macron’s departure an insurgent was shot dead by police. Seven people have been killed in the unrest and the material damage is estimated at more than one billion euros. It is not only the Overseas French Territory that is in danger of resembling the Wild West. Mayhem has become a characteristic of Macron’s France, and rarely does a week pass without an act of barbarity. On Sunday afternoon in Lyon a man with a knife wounded four passengers in the metro.

‘Sometimes when we turn on the television we get the impression that nothing’s going well in France,’ Emmanuel Macron said on Monday. ‘I don’t think it’s true.’ France's president has developed a knack of being overtaken by events – and so it has proved once again. A huge manhunt is underway after two prison guards were shot dead near Rouen in Normandy. The security officers were gunned down as they transferred a prisoner, described by police sources as a notorious drugs smuggler nicknamed ‘The Fly’, whose real name is Mohamed A. Two vehicles blocked the prison van on the A154 motorway and, as the prisoner was sprung, two of the guards were killed and three wounded in a fusillade of gunfire.

Donald Trump made headlines this month when he claimed that London and Paris are no longer recognisable because ‘they have opened their doors to jihad’. It was a characteristically provocative statement from the former US president, and one that had his many enemies huffing and puffing with indignation. Trump was wrong to describe the two cities as ‘unrecognisable’ but he was right in saying that a ‘jihad’ is being waged. The Brotherhood’s most successful achievement has been the introduction of a new word: Islamophobia ‘Jihad’, at least to non-Muslims, has violent connotations but the word means ‘struggle’ or ‘utmost effort’, and so there are also ideological jihads. This is the jihad that is being waged against the West this century.

Try as he might Emmanuel Macron and his party are unable to arrest the popularity of the National Rally. A month out from the European elections, the latest poll has their principal candidate, Jordan Bardella, on 32 points, double the score of Macron’s representative, Valerie Hayer. The latest head of state with dubious ethics to be courted by Macron is Xi Jinping Hayer and Bardella have clashed twice in recent days in live television debates, and on both occasions Hayer has condemned as ‘shameful’ the National Rally’s benevolence towards Vladimir Putin in the years leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That this strategy doesn’t appear to be working for the presidential camp is not a surprise.

Elections have a wonderful way of focusing a politician’s mind. So it is with Rishi Sunak and the Tories, who are hoping their Rwanda Bill will be their salvation come the general election. In Brussels, the EU also knows that the migrant crisis will be a significant factor in deciding the outcome of Europe’s elections next month. The omens, or rather, the polls aren’t good. The EU is bracing itself for what it describes as a ‘sharp right turn’ next month The EU is bracing itself for what it describes as a ‘sharp right turn’ next month. Certainly, the polls in France and Holland, to name but two of the bloc’s 27 countries, are predicting thumping victories for the parties of Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders.

Britain’s Rwanda Bill has exposed the deep divisions in France between how the people and the political elite regard mass immigration. Asked if they would like France to adopt a Rwanda-style bill, 67 per cent of the French canvassed replied favourably to the idea. This figure is no surprise: for years, polls on the subject of border control have returned results that show two thirds to three-quarters of the French are worried by mass immigration and its consequences. Emmanuel Macron had a different take on the Rwanda Bill. In a speech at the Sorbonne on Thursday, the president declared that he was opposed to ‘this model that some people want to put in place, which means that you go and look for a third country, for example in Africa, and send our immigrants there’.

Since 2012, the French actor Omar Sy has lived in Los Angeles. One of his houses has included a sprawling villa with five bedrooms, six bathrooms, an outdoor pool and a jacuzzi. With luxury like that perhaps it’s not surprising that Sy – known to British audiences for his role in X-Men, Jurassic World and Lupin – rarely returns to the Republic. But he’s in town this week to promote a book, and has been using his time in television studios to warn the good folk of France about the danger of voting for the ‘extreme right’. First, however, as befits a millionaire actor who lives in a very big house in La La land, Sy began his tirade by lamenting the erosion of the Republic’s principles of liberty, egality and fraternity. And why has this happened?