Gavin Mortimer

Last Sunday I marched through Paris with tens of thousands of disgruntled Frenchmen and women. I was there to observe, not holler and sing like those around me, a mix of Socialists, Communists and Greens. They had much that they wanted to get off their chest: the cost of living, ‘climate inaction’, the war in

Two years ago on Sunday Samuel Paty was brutally murdered by an 18-year-old outside his school in a Parisian suburb. The teacher’s crime was to have shown an image of the prophet Mohammed during a class discussion on the freedom of expression.   Paty’s killer was a Chechen, and it’s noteworthy that the two other

Contrary to popular myth, on the English side of the Channel, at least, the French can queue. Across the country thousands of men and women have for days sat patiently in their vehicles waiting their turn to fill up their tanks with petrol. Tempers have frayed on occasion, which is no surprise given what is

There should be a charity football match this evening in Paris between a team of MPs and an XI made up of former footballers, such as World Cup winner Christian Karembeu and the ex-Arsenal star Robert Pires. All proceeds – estimated to be around €35,000 (£32,000) – will go to a charity that protects children from

Last month the new Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, shared online a brief video of a Ukrainian woman being raped in Piacenza by an African migrant. The reaction among Italy’s media and political elite was one of outrage; not at the fate of the 55-year-old woman, but at Meloni for having dared posted the

Are Britain and France at the dawn of a new Entente Cordiale? It’s reported that France will be the destination for the first state visit of King Charles, and in New York this week Liz Truss and Emmanuel Macron took a break from the UN General Assembly for 30 minutes of ‘constructive’ talks. There are

While Emmanuel Macron spent Sunday in London honouring the memory of the late Queen Elizabeth, Marine Le Pen marked her return from a summer break with an address to the party faithful in the south of France. Buoyed by the success of the Swedish right in last week’s election, and anticipating a similar result on

Eric Zemmour is back. The bogeyman of French politics spent the summer licking his wounds after his far-right Reconquest party was wiped out in June’s parliamentary elections, but on Sunday he addressed several thousand supporters at a rally in the south of France. It is, hopes Zemmour, an opportunity to relaunch his political career and

Why, asked a French mayor at the weekend, has he been ordered to fly his town’s flag at half-mast for the Queen until the day of her funeral? In expressing his indignation at Macron’s presidential decree, Patrick Proisy, the mayor of Faches-Thumesnil, a suburb of Lille, pointed out that Mikhail Gorbachev was accorded no such

France is at war again, or as good as, according to Emmanuel Manuel’s recent rhetoric. This time the enemy is Russia, which at least is a more tangible adversary than Covid, on which the French president declared ‘war’ in March 2020. Most of the Republic believed him and submitted to one of the most draconian

How do you solve a problem like Jean-Marie? That is dilemma facing Marine Le Pen as her National Rally party prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of its creation next month. The party has evolved a great deal in that time, especially in the decade since Le Pen succeeded her father, Jean-Marie, as leader of

Priti Patel wants the police to get back to basics and solve crime instead of parading their progressive credentials at every available opportunity. It’s about time: recorded crime in England and Wales is at a 20-year-old high. Villains have never had it so good. Just 5.6 per cent of offences reported to police resulted in anyone

The age of abundance is over, declared Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday, which must have come as news to the 14 per cent of French people who live below the poverty line. The president has returned to the office after his summer break seemingly intent on bracing the Republic for a winter of discomfort, caused largely

Earlier this month I spent a week in Sicily, driving south from Palermo to Agrigento and then east to Syracuse and Messina. It was my first visit to Sicily in 17 years and, given the media reports, I had expected to find the island crowded with migrants from Africa. In fact, I saw none, other

In August 1999 a group of protestors demolished a McDonald’s restaurant under construction in Aveyron, southern France. Their leader was Jose Bové, a middle-class farmer, who whipped up his followers by declaring that ‘McDo is the symbol of the multinational who wants us to eat crap and make the farmers die’. The French regard that

If any further evidence was needed of the moral cowardice of the British political class it has been provided in the wake of the appalling attack on Salman Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution. There were of course messages condemning the atrocity in New York, although notably it took Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Ed Davey