Gavin Mortimer

Emmanuel Macron's visit to Moscow last week was reminiscent of a trip made by Charles de Gaulle to the Russian capital in November 1944. Neither man left much of an impression on their host. Macron, after six hours of talks with Vladimir Putin, failed to persuade the Russian president to de-escalate the situation on the Ukrainian border whatever he might have claimed to the contrary. De Gaulle, the leader of the recently-liberated France in 1944, made little headway with Stalin, who subsequently told the American ambassador Averell Harriman that he found the Frenchman ‘an awkward and stubborn man’. That description must have struck a chord with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.

After two rounds of the Six Nations, France is the only unbeaten team. Their victory against Ireland in a ferocious encounter in Paris on Saturday evening keeps them on course for the championship title. The last time France won the Six Nations crown was in 2010. The decade that followed was not kind to the national team. One might say their decline mirrored that of the country in general. They became a laughing stock, finishing bottom of the Six Nations in 2013 and suffering embarrassing defeats to the likes of Tonga and Fiji. Everything about the French team was amateur — their preparation, their fitness, their technique — compared to the clinical professionalism of their Six Nations rivals such as England, Ireland and Wales. But Les Bleus are back.

Paris Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Valérie Pécresse’s presidential election campaign is that it’s better than the Socialist party’s. Which is to damn with faint praise. The French left are in such a dire state that if the opinion polls prove correct, their candidate, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, won’t pass the 5 per cent mark in the first round required for candidates to recoup half their campaign costs. Pécresse has no worry on that score but she has failed to inspire the electorate since she was selected as the nominee for the centre-right Les Republicans (LR) in December. An opinion poll this week had her trailing Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, with Éric Zemmour only one point behind her on 14.

A penny for the thoughts of Vladimir Putin on Monday as he stared at Emmanuel Macron from the end of a very long table. If the Russian leader has a sense of irony he might have been struggling to suppress a smirk as he welcomed the President of France to Moscow to discuss the situation in Ukraine. Macron was in his element as he played the international statesman representing the EU, but the President will be dismayed to learn that his grandstanding has not impressed the folks back home. Of the 140,000 who have so far responded to an online poll in Le Figaro, 60 per cent considered his visit to Moscow a failure. It doesn't appear to have yet dawned on Macron and many other western leaders that the days of dispensing lessons in democracy to despots are over.

It is a peculiarity of how France has responded to the Covid pandemic that the unvaccinated, or those who have had only two jabs, are regarded as a greater threat to national security than Islamic extremists. The Covid passport, which came into effect last week, won overwhelming backing in parliament and in the senate, despite the reservations expressed by the Council of State in December. They said the passport would restrict the unvaccinated’s ‘liberty to come and go’. Six years ago the Council articulated similar concerns when the then-president, François Hollande, proposed a law that would strip dual nationals of their French citizenship for those convicted of terrorist offences.

Emmanuel Macron sees anti-Semitism everywhere except where it really lurks. Earlier this month his government accused protesters opposed to the Covid Passport of giving the Nazi salute, a charge that was disproved by video footage and this week dismissed by the public prosecutor’s office in Paris. Yesterday, in a speech to mark International Holocaust Day, Macron warned of the return of ‘an ill wind’ blowing through the continent in some ‘political discourse’. He vowed that France would never cease to honour the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust ‘particularly when some try to falsify it.

When French prime minister Jean Castex and health minister Olivier Véran held a press conference last week, they outlined the timetable for a gradual easing of the country's many Covid-19 restrictions. Véran talked of an 'encouraging evolution' in the fight against the virus, despite the fact that France had in the previous week recorded an average of over 300,000 daily cases.  As of 2 February, the wearing of masks outdoors will no longer be mandatory; a fortnight later, the French will be able to experience once more the pleasure of standing at a bar with a glass of whatever takes their fancy. Since the start of this month, this practice has been outlawed.

If, as many are predicting, the wheels are about to come off Boris Johnson's premiership, few world leaders will be as indifferent as Emmanuel Macron. He and the PM have rarely seen eye to eye.  It may very well have been more than just a coincidence that Johnson yesterday declared Britain was 'open for business' just as France's full vaccine pass came into force. The contrast is clear, as the Prime Minister surely intended. While Britain — or at least, England — is emerging from the Covid crisis, France, has in place some of the most stringent restrictions in the West. Masks remain mandatory outdoors and adults without three jabs to their arms can do little other than shop for groceries or go for a walk in the park.

When the vaccine pass comes into effect later this week, I will not be able to enter a bar or a restaurant. I will not be able to visit a museum or go to the movies. I will not be able to watch a live sports event or attend a music concert. I will not be able to take a regional train or walk through a shopping centre. And I will no longer be able to swim in my local pool or jog around the municipal running track. I could, of course, become a functioning member of French society in an instant if I went to my nearest vaccination centre, rolled up my sleeve and received a third jab, what the French call a 'rappel'. But I've weighed up the pros and cons, read articles such as the one in The Spectator by Dr Steve James, and decided that two vaccines will suffice for me.

Who are the ten per cent of the French population that Emmanuel Macron wishes to 'emmerder' or, as we say on this side on the Channel, 'piss off'? It is a question that is rarely scrutinised, certainly by the foreign press. Are the refuseniks the Gallic answers to Novak Djokovic and Piers Corbyn? There is in France, as in Britain, a vocal and aggressive anti-vax movement who propagate all manner of wild conspiracy theories about the jab. But they are in the minority among the unvaccinated. On the rare occasions when the French media probe the background of the five million who have declined the vaccination they find that they are predominantly young city-dwellers, often unemployed or on low incomes.

The new year has not started well for Emmanuel Macron. It began badly when some bright spark in the Elysée thought it would be a good idea to mark France's six-month presidency of the European Union by unfurling the bloc's blue and gold flag under the Arc de Triomphe. Millions of French were not amused at what they regarded as a sacrilegious gesture. Macron's two main rivals on the right, Marine Le Pen of the National Rally and Valérie Pécresse of the Republicans, accused the president of dishonouring the memory of the country's military. By Sunday, the EU flag had made a tactical withdrawal, to the delight of Le Pen, who crowed: 'The government has been forced to remove the EU flag from the Arc de Triomphe, a beautiful patriotic victory at the start of 2022.

Eric Zemmour enjoyed a propitious weekend as he embarked on his first official overseas visit as a presidential candidate. It began with the endorsement of Philippe de Villiers, an influential businessman and political commentator (and the brother of Pierre, the chief of the defence staff who quit in 2017 after falling out with Emmanuel Macron). De Villiers appeals to the more sophisticated senior conservative voter and he has carved out a reputation for himself in recent years as a pungent critic of Islam; among his oeuvre is the best-selling book, Will the church bells still ring tomorrow?. In explaining why he has thrown his support behind Zemmour, de Villiers said that he is the ‘only candidate with the judgment and courage to talk about civilisation.

The best way to describe Valérie Pécresse is Emmanuel Macron in a blouse. The newly-elected candidate for Les Republicans (LR) swears she is the French president’s polar opposite, but ideologically there is little to separate the pair. The 54-year-old Pécresse, who will now stand against Macron in next year's presidential election, has been on the political scene for three decades. She is currently the president of the Paris region, and is not only stinking rich, but a centrist, a globalist and a committed Europhile. Pécresse was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the poshest part of Paris, into an upper middle class family.

George W Bush will forever be in debt to The Donald. Before Trump became the 45th president of the United States, the man nicknamed 'Dubya' was widely considered by many Americans to be the most inept. Then came Trump. No longer was Bush a clown. The American left forget how they'd demonised him and looked wistfully to a time when there was dignity in the Oval Office. Marine Le Pen is experiencing something similar since Eric Zemmour's emergence as a presidential candidate. She is no longer Public Enemy No. 1 since her detractors turned their fire on Zemmour; where once their battle-cry before any election was 'Anyone but Le Pen', now it's 'Anyone but Zemmour' Le Pen is doing her best to exploit the situation.

So it's official: Eric Zemmour will stand as a candidate in next year's French presidential election. It was hardly a shock when he launched his campaign this morning with a video that was the visual equivalent of a Michel Houellebecq novel. Nearly seven years ago, Houellebecq's novel, Submission, depicted an incipient civil war in France as the 2022 election approached. Zemmour believes that fiction is now a reality. It seems that whether or not people agree, there is widespread interest in Zemmour's message: in the three hours since he launched the video on YouTube, it's been viewed 430,000 times.  France is going to pot, was the gist of his ten minute address, and unless I'm elected president forget about a rosy future.

Last month on Coffee House I drew attention to the inconsistency in how Europe responded to the migrant crises in Belarus and France. Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, was accused of ‘weaponising’ Middle Eastern migrants seeking to enter Europe at his country's border with Poland, but no government dared criticise France for the chaos in Calais. There is similar hypocrisy in how the EU has reacted to Dutch police firing live bullets at protesters in Rotterdam. Last Friday three people venting their anger at the fresh Covid restrictions imposed by the Dutch government were wounded by what a police spokesperson referred to as ‘warning shots’. Shouldn’t warning shots have been fired over protesters’ heads and not into their bodies?