Gavin Mortimer

In the three years since its landslide victory in the 2019 election, the Conservative party has shed nearly seven million voters. The astonishing statistic was revealed in a report by the centre right think-tank Onward, released on the same day Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister; at least he’s in no doubt as to the scale of his challenge. To stave off disaster, Onward’s Will Tanner (a former adviser to Theresa May while she was PM) said the Tories must aim to hit a ‘sweet spot’: by appealing to the six in ten voters who are ‘left of centre on the economy, but…socially and culturally conservative’. This year Marine Le Pen’s National Rally found that sweet spot among the French electorate, winning 89 seats in the parliamentary elections.

One in four Italians who voted at last month's election backed Giorgia Meloni’s conservative Brothers of Italy party – that is 7,302,517 men and women. Second in the general election was the centre-left Democratic party with 5,356,180 votes with 19 per cent. In other words, Meloni’s victory was resounding. Coming as it did after the brief premiership of the unelected Mario Draghi one might even call it a victory for democracy. Yet the western reaction to Italy electing its first female prime minister was overwhelmingly cold and aloof.

A penny for the thoughts of Emmanuel Macron on Saturday when it seemed Boris Johnson might once more occupy No. 10. Hasta la Vista, baby. Oh Mon Dieu, non! Macron’s opinion of the former PM is on record, and the French in general were aghast at the prospect of Boris back in charge. One newspaper asked its readers in an online poll if they would welcome a second dose of Johnson: of the 240,000 people who responded, three-quarters said no. There was a time when BoJo was all the rage in France. In the summer of 2021 he was more popular than Macron – not hard, admittedly, given his unpopularity in many quarters – but eventually the French concluded that their president was right: Johnson is a clown. The events of recent weeks have bemused the French.

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 Ukraine, the state of the health system and their opposition to social security reform. On Thursday it was the right who marched in Paris, led by Éric Zemmour, on the streets to voice their anger about the horrific murder of a 12-year-old in Paris. They see it as symptomatic of an immigration system they claim is broken.

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 major Islamist terror attacks in France in recent years – the murder of three worshippers in a Nice church and the killing of a policewoman in Rambouillet – were also the work of foreign-born terrorists.   Homegrown Islamic terrorists are now a rarity in France.

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 at stake. An opinion poll on Wednesday stated that two in three French people’s livelihoods have taken a hit because of the petrol shortage, a consequence of strike action at four refineries and a storage facility because of a wage dispute. Nonetheless, the same poll disclosed that 42 per cent of people support the strike action, compared to 40 per cent who don’t, with the ire of people directed primarily at Emmanuel Macron and his government.

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 online abuse. But on Tuesday evening several left-wing MPs withdrew because they couldn’t bring themselves to play in a team that, for the first time since the side was formed in 2014, contained some players from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.

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 footage on Twitter along with the declaration: ‘One cannot remain silent in the face of this atrocious episode of sexual violence against a Ukrainian woman carried out in daytime in Piacenza by an asylum seeker. A hug to this woman. I will do everything I can to restore security to our cities.

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.