Gavin Mortimer

It’s been a terrible start to the year for Emmanuel Macron and his new government. Aside from the well-publicised farmers’ protest, there has also been industrial action by teachers, train workers and staff at the Eiffel Tower. Cases of violent crime are at a record high, and the drugs trade is flourishing as never before with an annual turnover of €3 billion (£2.6 billion). Sunday was arguably the worst day of the year so far for the president, who likes to convey an image of a man in complete control. The glum-faced Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, appeared on television to announce that he has revised the Republic’s growth forecasts for 2024 downwards, from 1.4 per cent to 1 per cent of GDP. This means the state will need to make €10 billion (£8.

France’s new minister of culture has promised to put an end to the creeping cancel culture that is threatening the country. ‘Today wokeism has become a policy of censorship,’ said Rachida Dati, who was appointed to her post last month. ‘I am in favour of the freedom of art, the freedom of creation, and I am not in favour of censorship’. She explained that she will launch her campaign next week, summoning the great and the good of the cultural world to ‘ensure that we support creative freedom and do not support these new censors.’ Dati might have had in mind the 1,200 poets, editors, publishers, booksellers and actors, who recently signed a petition demanding the head of Sylvain Tesson, a celebrated travel writer.

The EU hopes that Taylor Swift and other pop starlets will come to its rescue in June’s European elections. With pollsters predicting significant gains for the right, Brussels’ ruling elite is preparing to turn to ‘famous artists, actors, athletes and other stars for help’. Their ambition is to persuade these personalities to encourage their young fans to vote in the elections – and to vote for them, the ruling centrist elite.   ‘No one can mobilise young people better than young people, that's how it works,’ said Margaritis Schinas, the EU Commissioner for Promoting the European Way of Life, recently. ‘That works better than commissioners speaking from the press room.

February has not started well for the European Union. On the first day of the month, furious farmers surrounded the parliament in Brussels, chanting defiance and throwing eggs at the people they blame for demeaning their industry. On Saturday, a man stabbed three people at the Gare de Lyon in Paris. The suspect in custody is from Mali but had lived legally in Italy since arriving in 2016. During questioning, the 32-year said his actions were motivated not by religion but by historical grievance, for what France ‘had imposed on his grandfather’. As has become the custom in these type of attacks, the initial explanation for the man’s rampage was attributed to ‘psychiatric problems’.

Dixmont, Yonne I am writing these words from my house in Burgundy. If I look over my shoulder out of the window I can see the house of my neighbour, a cereal farmer. If I look out to my right, across the fields, I can see the buildings of a cattle farmer. There is a third farm in my village where they produce cereal and vegetables. Every two days in France a farmer commits suicide. Others walk away from the industry Patricia, the wife of this third farmer, dropped by last night with a crate of potatoes. Her husband has been on the front line of the growing agricultural protest movement that began a fortnight ago in Toulouse. It has spread across the country.

Paris will be under siege from 2 p.m. today as farmers intensify their protest action and attempt to cut off the capital from the rest of France. They have announced plans to blockade all roads leading to Paris with their tractors, a threat that prompted interior minister Gérald Darmanin to summon police chiefs to his office on Sunday. Darmanin ordered them to ‘deploy a major defensive operation’ to ensure the farmers are not successful, particularly in their ambition to prevent access to airports and the international food market at Rungis. Prime minister Gabriel Attal had hoped he’d defused the anger of the agricultural industry on Friday when he travelled to the Haute-Garonne region in the south, where the protests began ten days ago, with a list of concessions.

Gabriel Attal has only been in his job for two weeks but the youngest prime minister in the history of the Fifth Republic is already facing a series of crises. The most pressing issue for the 34-year-old premier is the farmers’ protest, which began last Friday when a blockade was erected on the A64 motorway west of Toulouse.   Early yesterday morning a car drove into the blockade, killing a farmer and her 12-year-old daughter. Details of the crash emerged throughout the day: it was not a deliberate act, the driver and the occupants were foreign and were confused by the protest. Then it was revealed that the three people in the car were Armenians, in the country illegally, after their application for asylum had been rejected last year.

The farmers of France are mobilising. Their anger will be an early test for Gabriel Attal; the countryside is unknown territory for the new prime minister, a young man raised in the affluent suburbs of Paris, like the majority of Emmanuel Macron’s government.  The first dissent was on Friday in the south-west of France, in and around Toulouse. On the motorway linking the city to the Atlantic coast, the farmers erected a barricade with bales of hay that is still in place three days later. Their largest union, the FNSEA, has warned this is likely to be the first of many such actions. Their president, Arnaud Rousseau told the government: 'What interests me isn’t the performance, but the answers that will be given to farmers over the next few days to long-standing demands.

The great and the good of this world met in Davos this week to tell each other how wonderful they are. But amid all the bonhomie and back-slapping there loomed the spectre of You-Know-Who.   Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the Iowa caucuses was his first significant step towards a second term in the White House. His first was bad enough for the Davos set, but the possibility that Trump and his Deplorables might triumph in November is too much for many to bear. Macron believes he’s the top dog among the 27 EU leaders Last week, Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank, described Trump as ‘clearly a threat’ to Europe because his ideas on the environment and trade are out of sync with their own.

There has never been a more Parisian government than the one selected by Emmanuel Macron last week. Ten of its 15 ministers come from the capital, despite the fact that the Greater Paris region represents 18 per cent of the population.  New prime minister, Gabriel Attal, is a Parisian, the MP for a district in the south of the city. I was one of his constituents for a number of years; he did a decent job and, during political campaigning, I sometimes took a leaflet from one of his minions. They were all very much like Attal: same age, same breeding, same self-assurance.   I’m no longer a Parisian. Last year I moved to the provinces, to a quiet corner of Burgundy.

The French found out on Thursday evening that, under their new prime minister, nothing will change in the way their country is run. Gabriel Attal, the Boy Wonder who at 34 is the youngest premier of the Fifth Republic, unveiled his new cabinet – and there was a distinct lack of freshness. The controversial Gerald Darmanin remains as interior minister, despite the fact he has presided over unprecedented rises in crime and illegal immigration. Meanwhile, there is no change at the ministry of justice or the ministry of the economy.  The biggest talking points concern the new minister of culture, Rachida Dati, who served as minister of justice in Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right government between 2007 and 2009.

The French media has been busy marking the third anniversary of Britain’s official departure from the EU by gleefully reporting the sorry state of perfidious Albion. ‘The shipwreck of Brexit’ was the headline in Le Figaro, while France’s business paper, Les Echos, declared that the majority of Britons believe leaving the EU has been a ‘failure’. A radio station broadcast a segment on ‘Bregret’, hearing from disenchanted Britons about how wretched life was without Brussels. ‘With Brexit, the country was supposed to slow down immigration, which is now at record levels,’ the broadcaster stated. ‘Public health services are short of money and manpower, despite being promised unprecedented resources.

Emmanuel Macron has begun the new year by replacing one Socialist prime minister with another. Out goes Elisabeth Borne and in comes Gabriel Attal, who at 34 is almost half as young as his 62-year-old predecessor. Macron hopes that Attal will provide his ailing presidency with some youthful vigour after the disastrous 20 months of Borne’s premiership. The arch technocrat wasn’t Macron’s first pick for the choice of PM in May 2022, but the left-wing members of his party made it known that his first choice, Catherine Vautrin, was unacceptable on account of her conservatism. So Borne got the job, but proved inadequate and uninspiring.   As Le Figaro put it, her government was ‘chaotic, abrasive and sometimes explosive’, and she herself earned the nickname ‘Madame 49.3’.