Jonathan Miller

Team Putin has this week gained a new and vaguely prominent supporter: Nicolas Sarkozy, the disgraced former President of France.  French politicians do not have a reputation for ethical probity but Sarkozy takes the gateau Most sensible people here are on vacation and political news is thin so a pro-Moscow declaration of Sarko, in an interview with Le Figaro, has attracted more attention than it might otherwise have commanded.  In an interview published on Wednesday, Sarkozy argued that Europe needs to ‘clarify its strategy’ and seek a compromise with Russia rather than pursue its ‘strange idea’ of funding a war without waging it. He said there was no question of admitting Ukraine either to Nato or the EU and that it must cede territory to Russia for peace.

Montpellier A spectre is haunting Europe. In France, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and even Switzerland, the rule of law is being challenged by the rule of gangs. Disaffected young people cut off from society feel nothing but nihilistic contempt for it. Higher temperatures and social media are creating a heated summer. Judging from recent events in Paris and Stockholm, this year could be the worst so far. The rise of gang violence is associated with immigration. Europe has shown itself incapable or unwilling to control the influx of migrants, some of them genuine asylum seekers, others simply opportunists. Nor have European politicians succeeded in dealing with the problems created by immigration, despite spending billions on social projects.

Europe is lost in space. Ever since the Soviets orbited Yuri Gagarin and America landed men on the moon, Europe has proclaimed the ambition to compete on the final frontier. More than half a century later, Europe is unable to compete even with India, as in October it became incapable of launching its own payloads into space.  Europe’s space agency is an example of European chauvinism at its absolute worst Protected by political and bureaucratic omertà, and with little curiosity on the part of politicians and journalists, Europe’s clumsy space exploration efforts have forced it to turn for launch services to the Twitter and Tesla tycoon, the anarchist squillionaire Elon Musk.

To have ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings… and touched the face of God’ is amongst the most ancient dreams of humanity. Never better expressed than in the sonnet of pilot-poet John Gillespie Magee. Yet inevitably, the green blob has discovered a new target for cancelation: the air show. The magnificent men in their flying machines are being grounded on the altar of net zero. The most recent cancelation is in Sunderland, which has attracted more than one million visitors each year to see the Red Arrows, the Battle of Britain Memorial flight and aircraft from all over the world.

Last Friday, a beautiful 12-year-old Paris girl named Lola failed to come home from middle school. Later that evening, her raped, strangled and mutilated body was found near her home in a suitcase. The police quickly arrested a female suspect, ‘Dahbia B’, aged 24, whom they initially described as mentally ill. It then emerged that she was Algerian and was in an ‘irregular situation’ in France. And then that other Algerian migrants had also been arrested. As far as can be determined, on the day of the killing, ‘Dahbia B’ apparently waited for Lola to return home from school, seized her and took her to her sister’s apartment.

Is Emmanuel Macron a friend of the United Kingdom? Liz Truss said over the summer that she didn’t know, which was a reasonable response in the circumstances. This is a president surrounded by close advisors who hold Britain in barely disguised contempt. Other than a brief pretend bromance with Boris Johnson, whom Macron promptly knifed in the back and called a clown, the president threatened to cut the electricity interconnection between France and Britain in a row over fish. His government takes millions from Britain in return for pretending to stop boatloads of migrants launching themselves across the channel. Macron has described Nato as brain dead and fantasised that its security role could be Europeanised.

French elites are annoyed and perturbed that Italian elections have produced a new prime minister of the right, Giorgia Meloni, whom many within the Paris groupthink bubble consider to be practically a fascist. Not welcome news for Emmanuel Macron, who is up to his neck in problems. His European Renaissance is flailing. Eurozone inflation is at 10 per cent. Macron’s failure to win control of the National Assembly after his own reelection this year has derailed his legislative program, including pension reform, its centrepiece. Germany has turned out to be a catastrophic best friend, Merkel disappearing in a puff of smoke leaving energy chaos behind her.

Did Donald Trump have kompromat on Emmanuel Macron within the secret files seized by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago Xanadu? One of the files is known to have been titled ‘Info re: President of France’. And Trump is known to have bragged for years that he knew details of Macron’s sex life. Well, possibly. There’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Macron is not entirely conventional in the sexuality department, not least in his marriage to his former drama teacher, 25 years his senior.

The infection of France by le wokisme continues apace. Last year, president Emmanuel Macron vowed to stand against intersectionality only to see his parliamentary majority swept away in the recent National Assembly elections in part by the leftist coalition of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Now a new woketarian front is opening against the mores of traditional France as transgenderism asserts itself with a campaign by Le Planning Familial, the non-profit association influenced by the movement created originally in the United States, active in France for 62 years and that has recently transitioned itself. The movement, which is subsidised by the government, has moved from offering advice on contraception and abortion to a new focus on racism, white privilege and transgenderism.