Why has Brexit provoked the French so much?
Part 3 of 'Why do the French hate us?'
When French Prime Minister Jean Castex wrote to European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen about France failing to get all the fishing licences it wanted from the UK he set off a fascinating little episode which rather exemplifies EU-UK relations over the past five years.
Getting hold of the letter as an exclusive, Alex Wickham of the Politico website tweeted it out on the evening of 29th October, saying it represented a ‘huge escalation’ of the UK-France row over fishing.
Twitter attention turned quickly on to Wickham himself, gathering around his last sentence, “France tells Brussels it must demonstrate that Britain has been damaged by leaving the EU” – and accusing him of misinterpretation and mistranslation, variously for using the words ‘demonstrate’ and ‘damaged’. This was in a context in which many – including senior UK government figures – had started referring to it as a ‘punishment letter’.