Chequered past explains entente discordiale

THERE has been some puzzlement in the readers’ letter pages over the aggressive attitude of France towards us since our departure from the EU, especially regarding the sale of fish catches and the electricity supply to Jersey.

As one who has flitted into and out of France since I was a bi-lingual boy in 1948, let me explain. Of the 27 countries left in the EU, France has suffered most from our departure and is therefore likely to be the least forgiving.

Again, the reason is that France always benefited most from British membership. Back in 1970 when Edward Heath, following two rejections by Charles de Gaulle, was trying to persuade his successor Georges Pompidou to reverse the veto, he was slavish to Paris.

Back then, the Franco-German alliance ruled Brussels and France over-ruled Germany. De Gaulle was in retirement but still alive. He died in November that year and Pompidou finally relented. But there were terms, gruelling financial terms, on farming and fisheries, to ensure French farmers and fishermen were obliquely subsidised by this country.

That is what ended with Brexit and it has been felt keenly across the Channel. Hence the resentment. And the reprisals.

With a crucial election nigh, Emmanuel Macron is on a knife edge. The farming and fishing industries are crucial constituencies. Crystal?

THE MERRY town of Hungerford has a problem – it is a molehill of a problem out of which a mountain is being made. It has a plague of feral pigeons. They defecate everywhere and the good citizens of the Berkshire borough would seriously like them to be gone.

But the plan devised is pretty weird – capture them in nets and transport them to Whitby in Yorkshire. What the denizens of the pretty North Sea port have done to deserve such a fate remains a mystery. Have they even been consulted?

Surely a simpler and cheaper resolution stares in the face. Feral pigeons have a ferocious appetite. Array dishes of appetising pigeonnosh on the roofs of Hungerford and they will consume the lot.

But if that tucker were impregnated with contraceptive chemicals the birds would quickly become sterile. Then their numbers would wither away and their nests remain empty of eggs. Why does officialdom always seek the complicated and expensive?