How should Boris respond to the French?
Part 4 of ‘Why do the French hate us?’
I think Boris Johnson needs to explain himself.
It’s one of the remarkable things about our current Prime Minister that he doesn’t really do arguments. He doesn’t explain himself.
He didn’t in the Brexit campaign and he hasn’t since. Rather than confronting and beating them through argument, he relies on sailing past his opponents. I guess optimism and appearing to be energetic have served him quite well in his political career, so why change now?
As Prime Minister however, this is clearly not good enough. When you are meant to be in charge of a whole country, you need to make at least some sort of effort to make people understand what you are trying to do and what you stand for – and to bring others on board. But Boris doesn’t seem to be much interested in this. Indeed he doesn’t seem to be much engaged when it comes to convincing doubters – as if they will always oppose him, so why bother?
President Macron and his colleagues’ insults may be extraordinarily undiplomatic in the British sense of the word. However I think some of them, not least the one about a lack of ‘seriousness’ in Downing Street, do ring true.
Macron: going over Boris’ head
In the extraordinary series of attacks from the French Government of which I detailed some in Part 1, I think we are seeing a continuation of the Brexit campaign in a different form. We are witnessing diplomacy for a social media age: posed as much towards the people of the United Kingdom as towards its Government – and therefore able to get at that Government in a different way (though I think that the French and EU, by focusing overwhelmingly on Establishment, elite and London opinion, are reproducing the problems of the Remain campaign in doing this).
During the Brexit campaign itself, the EU institutions and its member states stayed mostly mute, at least in public. However, afterwards the gloves came off and they started landing their blows regularly, with the interminable Brexit negotiations as a nicely-curated stage on which the EU and its supporters could dictate terms, like a monarch handing out punishment to a wayward prince.
Led by the suave (and very serious) graduate of an elite ‘grande école’, Michel Barnier, French hands were all over the EU’s approach to these negotiations and the public narrative that accompanied them. While others have quietened down and appear to be coming to accept the reality of the United Kingdom outside the EU, the French are still very much in attack mode. I think Macron’s constant aggression exemplifies what those journalists and commentators who are close to Brussels meant when they said that ‘Brexit will never be over’. They meant that the EU’s strongest advocates would never consider it over and would keep on creating trouble as a form as revenge: apparently to show that it would never be over [UPDATE, 19/12/21: this has now partly accounted for the minister Lord Frost, who was managing the EU relationship and who is said to have “had enough of . . . [the] endless, exhausting skirmishes with Brussels.”]
One of Macron’s leading attack dogs against the British, the European affairs minister Clément Beaune, told French radio in October.
“The Channel Islands, the U.K. are dependent on us for their energy supply. The British think they can live on their own and badmouth Europe as well. And because it doesn’t work, they indulge in one-upmanship, and in an aggressive way.”
Beaune notably tweeted a clip out of the interview featuring the hashtag #Brexit: ramming home the point that whatever the French are doing is actually your fault. For my part I can’t say I’ve seen any of this ‘badmouthing’, ‘one-upmanship’ and ‘aggression’ from our Government. Quite the opposite, in fact. I think it has been remarkably meek and accommodating, with lots of talk of ‘friends and partners’ and ‘allies’ as the insults come flying the other way: trying to take the heat out of the thing while the other side turns it up.
Since Brexit the French have been spoiling for a fight. They made it pretty clear they were almost from the beginning. I think all the offence-taking is really about the cheek of a country that was in their sphere of influence under the EU banner now going about its business without their permission. From their point of view submission of one kind or another appears to be the only solution.