Gavin Mortimer

Gavin Mortimer

Gavin Mortimer is a British author who lives in Burgundy after many years in Paris. He writes about French politics, terrorism and sport.

Saturday

Gavin Mortimer

Marine Le Pen is unstoppable

Marine Le Pen returned to court this week to contest her conviction last spring for misusing EU funds. Convicted of diverting more than €4 million (£3.5 million) meant for Brussels affairs in order to pay her staff, the leader of the National Rally was fined €100,000 (£86,600) and disqualified from politics for five years with immediate effect. The appeal will last a month and the verdict is expected in June. If Le Pen is successful, she will be able to run in next year’s presidential election; if she fails to overturn or drastically reduce the sentence, her protégé, 30-year-old Jordan Bardella, will represent the National Rally. Le Pen struck a more conciliatory tone when she addressed the court at the start of the appeal.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

Is Steve Bannon right about Jordan Bardella?

From our US edition

Marine Le Pen returned to a court in Paris on Tuesday as her appeal began against her five-year ban from political life. The leader of the National Rally was disqualified in March last year after she was found guilty of misusing €4 million ($4.6 million) of funds from the European Union. She claims she is the victim of a political witch-hunt, a view supported by President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D Vance. The appeal will last a month and the verdict is expected in June. If Le Pen is successful she will be able to run in the presidential election in April 2027. If she fails, however, it will be her protege, 30-year-old Jordan Bardella, who will represent the National Rally.

jordan bardella

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

TikToks won’t stop illegal migration

The Labour government may not like X these days but they have turned to another social media platform in their latest bid to smash the gangs and stop the boats. As of today, an official Home Office TikTok account will have the people smugglers quaking in their boots as it posts images of illegal migrants and foreign criminals being arrested, detained and deported. What is a TikTok channel if not gesture politics? Called ‘Secure Borders UK’, the TikTok channel’s mission statement is ‘restoring order and control to our borders’. It’s a similar refrain to the rhetoric deployed by Keir Starmer in May 2024 as he campaigned to become PM. In a speech that month he outlined how he would stop the boats. He also castigated the Tories for their attempts to curb illegal immigration.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

The French obsession with Epstein

From our US edition

The ongoing revelations about the rich and famous who rubbed shoulders with Jeffrey Epstein are receiving extensive coverage in France. Print and broadcast media have pored over the details of the deceased sex offender and the famous names contained in the Epstein files, from princes to presidents to pop stars. There is a French connection to Epstein in model scout Jean-Luc Brunel, who was alleged to have trafficked girls for the pedophile financier. He was arrested at Charles de Gaulle Airport in 2020 and was found hanged in his prison cell two years later. But overwhelmingly what the French media have described as l’affaire Epstein is an Anglo-Saxon sex scandal. ‘Isn’t a certain tolerance for infidelity what the French have given the western world, along with great wine?

Gavin Mortimer

The imposters who pretend to be heroes

‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea,’ wrote James Boswell of Samuel Johnson in his biography of his friend in 1778. Evidently Jonathan Carley did. The retired teacher was found guilty on Monday of impersonating a rear admiral without permission. The 65-year-old was fined £500 by Llandudno magistrates’ court, and ordered to pay £85 prosecution costs and a £200 surcharge. Carley was arrested last November, days after he had appeared at the town’s Remembrance service in naval uniform with a dozen medals pinned to his chest. He told police that he had carried out the deception to have a sense of ‘belonging and affirmation’.

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

France’s revolting farmers could bring down Macron

Paris has been invaded this morning by more than 100 tractors driven by furious farmers. Just before dawn, a tree was felled by the protestors in the west of the capital close to the Roland Garros tennis stadium. The farmers have warned more will follow. ‘They want to slaughter our cows, so we're going to slaughter their trees,’ one farmer told reporters. This is the France that the Paris elite despises: the France that loves its traditions, that works hard, pays its taxes and despairs at the country's chronic mismanagement There have been other acts of rebellion in the country. Access to the southern city of Rodez has been blocked and a fuel depot near Bordeaux has been encircled by tractors. There are also barricades on several motorways.

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

George Clooney has been seduced by a French fantasy

Bonjour and bienvenue to the Clooneys. Gorgeous George, his wife Amal and their eight-year-old twins have been granted French citizenship. The Hollywood actor has long had a deep streak of Europhilia, owning luxury properties in Berkshire and Lake Como, Italy, as well as his pad in Provence. Located near the village of Brignoles, the Clooneys’ €9 million wine estate spans 425 acres, including an olive grove, swimming pool and tennis court. In an interview last month with a French radio station, 64-year-old Clooney declared (in English) that ‘I love the French culture, your language, even if I'm still bad at it after 400 days of courses’. He also praised France’s privacy laws, citing them as the principal reason he and his wife want to raise their children there.

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Was Maduro’s capture the greatest special forces raid in history?

On this occasion no one can accuse Donald Trump of hyperbole. The American president praised the Delta Force team that seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as ‘incredible’. The operation to capture Maduro – codenamed 'Absolute Resolve' – was months in the planning, and Trump watched it unfold in real time. ‘They broke into places that were not really able to be broken into,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ According to the New York Times, the operation began last August when CIA officers infiltrated Venezuela and began gathering intelligence about the habits and movements of Maduro.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

Britain has lost faith in Labour’s ability to ‘smash the gangs’

More than 41,000 migrants crossed the Channel in small boats in 2025, a number surpassed only by the 45,000 who made the voyage in 2022. In total, 41,472 people reached England from France, a 13 per cent increase on 2024. The weather was a factor: according to the Met Office, last year provided Britain with the most hours of sunshine – 1,622 – since records began in 1910. But of greater significance is the ineptitude of the British government in stopping the small boats. A spokesperson for the Home Office described the 2025 figures as ‘shameful’, adding that ‘the British people deserve better’. They would say that, wouldn’t they? It is the hollow rhetoric that the British people have come to expect from Westminster this century.

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Will bromance bloom between Trump and Jordan Bardella?

From our US edition

Life has never been so good for Jordan Bardella, the 30-year-old president of Marine Le Pen's National Rally. A recent opinion poll had him as the runaway favorite to win the 2027 presidential election. One man who believes in his credentials is the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. Now out of prison and promoting the book he wrote during his 20-day incarceration, the center-right Sarkozy said that Bardella reminds him of a young Jacques Chirac. Despite Sarkozy’s conviction for criminal conspiracy, he retains a large and loyal fanbase among the metropolitan boomer bourgeois, a demographic that the National Rally has traditionally struggled to attract.

bardella
Gavin Mortimer

France is becoming a nation of sexless puritans

Bring back brothels! It’s not your typical political slogan, but Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has launched a campaign to reopen and regulate France’s brothels for the benefit of sex workers. In an interview last week Jean-Philippe Tanguy, one of Le Pen’s senior MPs, said his party would table a bill to reopen the brothels – known as maisons closes in France – which were closed in 1946. ‘The prostitutes would be empresses in their own kingdom,’ explained Tanguy. Le Pen’s party believes that regulated brothels would better protect sex workers from violence. But some on the left are outraged at the proposition. In an op-ed in the left-wing L'Humanité newspaper, 12 lawyers dismissed the idea as a ‘fascist project’.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

Stopping the boats will be harder than Jordan Bardella thinks

France's Jordan Bardella has promised to stop the boats. Now where have we heard that before? The president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally made his boast on a day trip to London on Tuesday. After lunching with Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, the 30-year-old outlined his strategy for curtailing the passage of illegal immigrants between France and England. ‘My ambition is to make France the least attractive country for mass immigration in Europe,’ explained Bardella. ‘From there, if it is no longer possible to cross, then there will be no one left in Calais.’ Bardella said he will make France unattractive for migrants by abolishing the right of asylum, expelling foreign criminals and giving French citizens priority to social housing and welfare.

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

Bardella and Le Pen are closer to power than ever before

The 20 days that Nicolas Sarkozy recently spent behind bars have been turned into a book published today. The 70-year-old former president of France was convicted of criminal conspiracy after a long-running investigation into charges his aides approached Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi for campaign funds. ‘Sarko’ was jailed for five years but he was released after 20 days while his appeal is heard. Diary of a prisoner is Sarkozy’s account of his incarceration, written in his cell where ‘grey dominated everything, devoured everything’. But it is what the former president has written about the future of France that has made the headlines.

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Yes, Europe’s civilization is being erased

From our US edition

Last week the Trump administration expressed its fear that Europe faces "civilizational erasure." Its concern was articulated in a 33-page National Security Strategy that outlined Donald Trump’s world view and how America will respond economically and militarily. The sentence that caused the most reaction on the other side of the pond was the assertion that, if current trends continue, Europe will be "unrecognizable in 20 years or less." Those trends are mass immigration and what conservative French commentators call the "Islamification" of Europe. If Europe doesn’t address these trends, the Trump administration predicts the continent’s "civilizational erasure.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

David Lammy is wrong about Brexit and the EU

David Lammy believes Britain should rejoin the EU customs union to boost economic growth. In an interview on Thursday, the Deputy Prime Minister argued that leaving the EU had ‘badly damaged’ Britain’s economy. A reversal of Brexit would be good for business he suggested. It was 'self-evident' that other countries had 'seen growth' after joining the customs union, Lammy told the News Agents podcast. The deputy PM avoided the question of whether Britain should rejoin the euro, as did Health Secretary Wes Streeting earlier in the week. Having declared that Britain was worse off out of the EU, Streeting was asked if the government was planning to take Britain back in. ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied.

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Are America’s women heading for the exit?

From our US edition

Life is apparently so disagreeable in Donald Trump’s America that 40 percent of women aged between 15 and 44 want to leave. That is four times higher than the 10 percent who wanted to quit the US in 2014. According to Gallup, which conducted the poll, nearly half the nation’s younger women have “lost faith in America’s institutions.” This disenchantment accelerated after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which enshrined the constitutional right to abortion. Younger American men are bearing up better. Only 19 percent share women’s distaste for the Donald, a 21 percent differential which is the largest recorded by Gallup since it began asking the question in 2007.

Women

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Why the prospect of peace in Ukraine is troubling Macron

Emmanuel Macron welcomed Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky to Paris this morning to discuss ‘the conditions for a just and lasting peace’. But is the French leader nervous about what peace in Ukraine might mean for Europe – and for France? There may be another reason why Macron is concerned at what peace in Ukraine might bring. It is an anxiety shared by others in Europe In an interview with a Sunday newspaper, France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, declared that ‘peace is within reach, if Vladimir Putin abandons his delusional hope of reconstituting the Soviet Empire by first subjugating Ukraine’. Macron showed little enthusiasm initially for the 28-point peace plan put forward by the USA and Russia, warning that Putin was not a man to be trusted.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

France’s military service rollout is about more than Russia

National service is being brought back in France. Emmanuel Macron used a visit to a military base in the Alps on Thursday to outline his initiative. The service will begin next year for a term of ten months, and it will be voluntary. Macron's plan is being viewed as a response to the Russian threat, but for many French people there is a greater – and far closer – menace than president Putin. This view is shared among the silent majority and explains why Le Pen’s party now has the most seats in parliament Macron set a target of 50,000 annual recruits by 2035 with most aged 18 and 19, although it will be open for men and women up to 25 who have specific skills. France scrapped military conscription in 1996 but this new variation has the broad support of the public.

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Did the Louvre robbers want to get caught?

It is more than a month since thieves stole the crown jewels from the Louvre and the chances of recovering the loot, worth an estimated €88 million, diminish with every passing day. The robbery was initially dubbed the ‘heist of the century’, a brazen theft in broad daylight as visitors strolled through the world’s most famous museum. They were up and down the ladder and in out of the museum in seven minutes, giving the impression that this was the work of villains well-versed in daring robberies. Are the alleged perpetrators of the Louvre heist happy to go to prison for a few years knowing that when they get out they’ll get some of the proceeds?

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

A decade after Bataclan, France is more divided than ever

Ten years ago today, Islamist terrorists massacred 130 people in a coordinated attack across Paris. It was the heaviest loss of life on French soil since the second world war, and those who perished – as well as the 350 who were wounded – will be remembered today in a series of commemorations. Emmanuel Macron will visit the six sites where the terrorists struck, among them the Stade de France and the Bataclan concert hall, and the president will also inaugurate a memorial garden at Place Saint-Gervais, opposite Paris City Hall. According to the Élysée Palace, the day will be an opportunity for the nation ‘to honour the memory of those who lost their lives…and reaffirm its ongoing commitment to the fight against terrorism’.