Gavin Mortimer

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 many in France who long for a closer relationship with Britain and, at the same time, for a gradual decoupling from Germany. I wrote in April last year of the growing French scepticism towards Germany; of how in the words of one current affairs magazine, France has for decades been ‘fleeced’ by its eastern neighbour economically. Rare were the politicians who pointed this out.

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 Sunday when the Italians go to the polls, Le Pen attributed what she called a ‘patriotic wave’ sweeping the continent to the EU’s failure to tackle mass immigration in the last decade. In the opinion of Le Pen no one embodies this failure more than Macron. Last Thursday the president told an assembly of prefects that a new immigration bill would be tabled by his government in early 2023.

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 judging by his recent media appearances he won’t be watering down his right-wing rhetoric. Railing against immigration, environmental extremists and the sanctions on Russia, Zemmour picked up from where he left off in the spring. When it was put to him by one interviewer that he had paid the price electorally for focusing too much on immigration, Zemmour replied: ‘I was wrong electorally, but history will prove me right.

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 honour when he died. Yet he was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, an instrumental figure in tearing down the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe for half a century. The refusal of Proisy, of the left-wing La France Insoumise, to comply with the order to lower his town’s flag as a mark of respect for the Queen has caused headlines in France. It has also created a backlash on social media.

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 lockdowns in Europe. The state of health emergency imposed by Macron ended only at the start of last month, by which time millions of French understood that it had been a phoney war on a virus that wasn’t half as deadly as their president had had them believe. Barely a fortnight after the health emergency was lifted, Macron was once more issuing a warning of doom and gloom, this one about the ‘price’ the French must pay for supporting Ukraine.

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 a party that for most of its existence has been known as the National Front. The rebrand to the National Rally occurred in 2018, the most significant action taken by Marine Le Pen in her bid to leave behind the malodorous legacy of her father.

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 being charged or summonsed in 2021-22, a drop of ten per cent from 2014-2015.   The Home Secretary is said to support a paper by the Policy Exchange think tank that warns that the police’s persistence in espousing social justice causes is ‘hugely damaging’ to public confidence. There is a growing sense among the public that the police have thrown in the towel, at least when it comes to keeping the streets safe.

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 by the effect of western sanctions on Russia after their invasion of Ukraine six months ago. Last Friday he told the French in Churchillian tones to accept that rising energy and food bills were the ‘price of liberty’, and he returned to the theme yesterday when he addressed his ministers. ‘Our system based on freedom in which we have become used to living, sometimes when we need to defend it, it can entail making sacrifices,’ said Macron.

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 than those I glimpsed in a fenced-off processing centre at the quayside in Agrigento, the first port of call for many migrants who arrive in Sicily. Last week the local paper in Agrigento drew on official government figures to reveal that so far in 2022, 45,664 migrants have landed on Italian territory, an increase of 40 per cent on the same period last year.

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 summer’s day 23 years ago as the birth of the anti-globalist movement, the progenitor of a multitude of protest groups whose modus operandi has been direct action. Bové subsequently went into politics, representing the Green party in the European parliament between 2009 and 2019. Today he is retired but his example continues to inspire radical environmentalists.

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 the best part of 24 hours to find the time to react. One might have expected the leaders of two of the three main political parties in Britain to consider such a sinister assault on Western values worthy of immediate comment. From Mark Drakeford, the first Minister of Wales, and Nicola Sturgeon there has been only silence, although Scotland’s leader did tweet a photo of herself with Basil Brush on Saturday afternoon.

If the reports are right and it was Ukrainian special forces who destroyed as many as 20 Russian aircraft at Saki air base in Novofedorivka, Crimea, on Tuesday, president Volodymyr Zelensky might be minded once more to raise a glass to the British. Earlier this year it was widely reported that British special forces were in Ukraine training local troops – but perhaps they also found time to pass on some of the regiment’s illustrious history. It was the Special Air Service (SAS) who pioneered the tactic in North Africa, destroying over 200 Italian and German aircraft in a series of devastating raids 80 years ago.

Five years ago, Paris was named the host city for the 2024 Olympics. How the country celebrated. No one more than its fresh-faced president Emmanuel Macron. ‘I salute this success and the tremendous opportunity that the Games represent to assist in the transformation of our country,’ he declared. Macron was speaking in a wider context, too. The Olympics was one strand of what he envisioned as a whole-scale transformation of the republic into a start-up nation, a modern, harmonious and prosperous country. How has that worked out, Monsieur Le President? France has never been so divided. The raucous National Assembly – where the left and the right holler and jeer at each other – is representative of the bitter tribalism taking root across the country.

What must Africans think when they observe the shameless hypocrisy of Western leaders? In Cameroon this morning incredulity must be the prevailing emotion. Three days ago, dignitaries there were subjected to one of Emmanuel Macron’s insufferable bouts of moralising. Do not do business with Vladimir Putin, warned the French president, speaking shortly after Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov had visited various African countries, some of which are heavily dependent on Russian grain and energy. He alluded to Russia as an ‘authoritarian regime’ and praised Europe for its response to the war in Ukraine. Unfortunately on the African continent, continued Macron: ‘I too often see hypocrisy…in not knowing how to qualify a war.

France and Britain have been bickering again, this time about the chaos at the ferry ports over the weekend. The ‘clown’, as Emmanuel Macron reportedly dubbed Boris Johnson, may be on his way out, but there seems no end in sight to the circus that Anglo-French relations have become. Might that change with a new ringmaster in No. 10? Maybe, if Rishi Sunak wins the contest to become prime minister. Sunak and Macron are similar in many ways beyond their background in finance; presentable and polished but, so say their detractors, ideologically shallow. In this week’s Spectator Douglas Murray describes Sunak as resembling ‘someone who has floated to the top and rarely had to get his hands dirty with political debate, never mind political warfare’.

It’s been five weeks since Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won 89 seats in the French parliamentary elections and thus far no one has goosestepped into the National Assembly. This has come a shock to the left who have spent a decade warning that a vote for Marine Le Pen’s party was a vote for fascism. In one unintentionally hilarious op-ed column in Le Monde in 2012, the author compared Le Pen to Adolf Hitler, although he conceded ‘she doesn’t have a moustache’. True, a Nazi salute was seen in the National Assembly this month but it was delivered by one of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance MPs, Rémy Rebeyrotte, who is now under parliamentary investigation.

Two of Emmanuel Macron’s ministers were rebuked last week for words they had spoken in the past, but only one is fighting for their job: Caroline Cayeux, who is responsible for 'territorial cohesion'. Last Tuesday, she was asked by the public senate if she regretted saying in 2013 that gay marriage ‘goes against nature’. Cayeux, a Catholic, said she stood by her words, though she was keen to stress that she had ‘a lot of friends among these people’. Uproar ensued and two of her fellow ministers, Clément Beaune and Olivier Véran condemned her ‘anachronistic remarks’.

Here are some statistics that ought to send a shudder through Tory MPs. Between 1995 and 2012 the French centre-right was in presidential power, first under Jacques Chirac and then the administration of Nicolas Sarkozy. The month after Sarko was elected president in 2007, his party, Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), won 313 seats in the National Assembly. Today, following a rebrand to become Les Républicans in 2015, they have 62. This is actually better than some expected considering their 2022 presidential candidate, Valérie Pécresse, won just 4.8 per cent of the electorate’s votes, below the 5 per cent threshold required for candidates to be reimbursed their campaign expenses.