The French connection

As Emmanuel Macron brings his presidential campaign to London, and Oxford University considers

IT IS 5.35pm and the queue at Westminster’s Central Hall snakes around the block, several people deep. The doors opened five minutes ago. It’s teeming but orderly and populated by sedate, polished expatriate Frenchmen and women — businessmen, students, soignée middle-aged women — who are waiting to hear Socialist presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron address the crowd.

Macron is the handsome 39-year-old former banker who appeals largely on the grounds of his relative novelty and dynamism. He split from President Hollande’s Socialist Party to form his own, En Marche (“On the Move”), and is riding a growing wave of popularity. While Marine Le Pen is leading first-round polls, with two months to go until the election Macron is currently on course to defeat the Front National leader by 58 per cent to 42 per cent in the crucial second round. His wife, Brigitte Trogneux, is 24 years his senior. The couple met when she taught him French at La Providence high school in Amiens, and they were married in 2007.

Macron arrived in London yesterday morning and met the Prime Minister in Downing Street, before shooting up to Westminster to deliver his speech. It is not unusual for a French candidate to address Londoners — Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy both did so. As Boris Johnson famously quipped, by population London is France’s sixth-largest city. Our capital even has its own French MP — Axelle Lemaire, a 42-yearold Socialist Party member based in Kensington. However, organisers say that turnout last night exceeded expectations. “I am surprised by the attendance,” says Guel, a 34-year-old banker who has been working in London for six years and was queuing to watch Macron. “It’s quite impressive.” Moreover, London is significant, he says. “London has always been a bit of a test electoral market,” he continues. “I think the demographic can be representative of the liberal youth.”

“All the significant politicians come to London,” says a fiftysomething Frenchwoman who has lived in Hammersmith for 20 years. “Though I would be interested to know if all the people who are in the queue are actually registered to vote in the UK.”

Oliver, 17, a sixth-form student who will turn 18 in time for the election, has travelled all the way from Birmingham to listen to Macron. “He cares about young people,” he says, “and there’s a personal aspect — he’s young, charismatic and has a lot of energy.”

There’s a separation anxiety among France’s estranged population here. “Obviously we’re not living in France,” says Wuraola, 34, a Macron supporter who has lived in London for 10 years, “but by being outsiders, arguably we have the best view. We’re immigrants to the UK, so we know what that’s like,

‘London has always been a test electoral market for France — the demographic represents liberal youth’

but we haven’t lost our sense of being French because there’s such a huge community here.” Of 400, 000 French nationals living in the UK, 300,000 live in London.

This is far removed from the style of boisterous, devout rally that Donald Trump has popularised. Many of the voters here were yet to make up their mind. One says firmly that Macron is “definitely not my candidate”; others are cautious of his inexperience in office. However, the numbers here suggest a lively interest in events across the Channel that is more than soft, token nationalism. For French expatriates, the premonitions of Brexit and the choruses of nationalism resounding across Europe add a disquieting dimension to their own election. Macron’s highest-profile opponent, Marine Le Pen, has suggested she will take France out of the economic union if she wins in May. “This election will really show the French position as a European community,” continues Wuraola. “It’s our Brexit. On the one hand you have Macron with his open arms towards Europe; on the other, Marine Le Pen.”

Macron spoke for more than an hour, walking onto the stage to cries of, “Macron, Macron, Macron!” Speaking about his meeting with Theresa May, he said he told the PM that “the execution of Brexit had to be compliant with French interests and the European interest. I don’t want to accept any caveat or any waiver.”

HE ALSO hopes to lure some of his expatriates back to Paris from London — as well as Brits. At Downing Street, Macron declared that he wants “banks, talents, researchers, academics” to move to France after Brexit. He has promised “a series of initiatives to get people working here to come to France”.

And it’s a mood shared here. This week, HSBC announced it would likely be dispatching a cohort of bankers to Paris after Brexit, and it was revealed that Oxford University is considering a campus in France.

The relationship between London and France is symbiotic. There is a relationship between the Mayors of Paris and London — Anne Hidalgo visited Sadiq Khan in his first week in office. And London has its own pseudo French villages, complete with large and thriving lycées that feel both very French and entirely a part of London. The most famous is the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington, which has almost 400 students aged between