Macron and on and on and on and on... what an old French windbag!
Tries not to snooze watching the President at Sandhurst
BY the time it ended at seven o’clock last night, Theresa May’s Sandhurst summit with French president Emmanuel Macron was more than an hour behind schedule. During the closing Press conference, the reason became obvious. President Macron is the most frightful windbag. Quel moulin a paroles!
Presumably he talked at similar length during the summit’s various ministerial meetings and over the lunch Mrs May gave him at Sir Michael Parkinson’s Royal Oak pub at Littlefield Park, Berkshire.
It’s a wonder the carved duck breast with roasted onion tartlet didn’t curl up on the plate while Monsieur Macronandonandon was jabbering away. Mrs May is not much of a drinker but I bet she was starting to fantasise about a second bottle of the 2013 Domaine Grand Romane.
It was wet and windy at the Royal Military Academy by the time the president and Prime Minister stood at an open-sided bandstand and inspected bearskinned troops from the Coldstream Guards. Mrs May looked frozen, bending into the breeze like a figure from a Lowry painting. A rainbow appeared. A good augury?
He’s not tall, Macron – an eighth of an inch shorter than his hostess, perhaps. Napoleon. Sarkozy. Macron.
NOT exactly second-row- of-thescrum material, any of them. But he is clever at hogging the limelight and when it came to the group photograph with French ministers and with some of our home team such as Boris, Amber Rudd and Philip Hammond, M Macron stepped forward half a pace to make himself more prominent. Crafty. You need to watch a man like that. The Press conference opened with prepared opening statement from both heads of government. Mrs May’s was the length, roughly, of a modern pop record.
M Macron’s lasted as long as some opening movements at the Albert Hall. Foreign Secretary Boris was sitting in the front row of the Sandhurst hall where the event was being held. He was not wearing an earpiece to connect him to the simultaneous translation. Perhaps Boris’s French is fluent enough for him to understand without a translator or perhaps he chose not to listen in case he ‘did a Swayne’ and fell asleep.
While Mrs May was speaking, France’s finest kept gazing across at her, round- eyed. Longingly? That would be putting it too strongly. Anyway, at 61 she’s too young for him. But when they were talking about the Bayeux Tapestry he did say ‘we must somehow make a new tapestry together’. What a chat-up line. He is a fidgety sort of performer, not quite as itchy as Sarkozy but still full of gesticulations and facial movements. He kept webbing his hands and holding them up to the camera. All this helped to compensate for his stultifying verbosity.
The longer he talked, the more you could sense Mrs May forcing herself to look fascinated, wobbling her head and pushing her chin forward. Had Sir Desmond Swayne been in the room, he would have fallen out of his seat by this point.
Questions arrived: Brexit, migrant problems at Calais, that tapestry and a doomladen attempt by a chap from the Financial Times to speak French (more Linguaphone lessons needed, George).
On Brexit, M Macron possibly let slip a small hint that we could be looking at a Canada-style trade deal with the EU after we have regained our freedom. He smiled coyly when asked if he was trying to win Britain back into the EU but he did say he respected our democratic decision to leave. On migrants in northern France, ‘the situation is still problematic, as I said at length in Calais’.
The most believable part of that sentence was the ‘ at length’. Mind you, if Brexit is going to be the economic disaster for us that the EU keeps predicting, it’s surprising they think any migrants are going to want to come our way.
Meanwhile, everything rude we London journos have ever said about Mrs May being a bore, we take back. Compared to Macronandonandon, she’s electric soup.