FRENCH CONNECTION
Will our next prime minister be able to charm Macron?
WHEN Emmanuel Macron turned up to the V & A for a reception at the end of the Franco-British summit in January 2018, he was given a rock star’s welcome. Among those who managed to grab a photo with the French president was one Boris John
son, then foreign secretary. In the goofy picture that Johnson tweeted later that night, the two men — one dishevelled, the other dapper — are side by side and grinning, each giving the thumbs up.
Soon, assuming he wins the election as Conservative leader, Johnson will be seeking far more than a photo from the French president. If there is one political leader in Europe whose views will shape the EU’s attitude to a Johnson prime ministership, it is Macron. It was the French president’s refusal to grant a long extension to the Brexit negotiations proposed by other European leaders, after all, that led to the compromise date of October 31. How will the two shape up to each other?
Macron and Johnson have met, but don’t know each other well (although the French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, a close Macron ally, had regular dealings with Johnson during his time as foreign secretary, and Le Drian’s chief of staff at that time, Emmanuel Bonne, has now become Macron’s diplomatic adviser).
If anything, over the past year or so, the pair’s relationship has largely consisted of trading indirect insults. The revelation that the BBC cut Johnson’s comment describing the French as “turds” over Brexit was widely reported in the French media, and will not have escaped Macron. But nor will it have surprised him.
Johnson’s grandmother was halfFrench and he may speak reasonable if imperfect French, having been at school for a spell in Brussels. He may once have even declared on French television that “I adore France”. But Johnson’s attitude to the French people is more generally informed by a British public school jocular sense of superiority, mixed with what seems to be a splash of envy for the French art de vivre.
INDEED Johnson often seems to be a walking advertisement for Stephen Clarke’s book “1,000 Years of Annoying the French”. When he was Mayor of London, he told the 2012 Tory party conference that the French were welcome to flee to Britain to escape the horrors of life in France under Socialist president François Hollande: “Not since 1789,” he declared, “has there been such a tyranny and terror in France.” Later that year, Johnson claimed that “the sans-culottes appear to have captured the government in Paris” and urged foreign businesses to come to London instead.
The rivalrous clash continued after
The revelation that Johnson called the French ‘turds’ over Brexit will not have escaped Macron — nor suprised him
Macron was elected in 2017. While on a trip to India the following year, he tweeted( in English) an appeal to Indian students to study in France. Johnson promptly re tweeted the president with a counter-appeal, boasting Britain has four of the world’s top 10 universities, and using the hashtag #education is great in English.
Of course, Macron has been forth
right in his views too. Among EU leaders, he has consistently been the one to speak out in favour of taking a tough line over the British stalemate. Earlier this year, European Council president Donald Tusk, and German chancellor Angela Merkel, were notably more open to the possibility of a longer extension.
Macron, by contrast, irritated even his close partner Germany by refusing initially to countenance an extension, and France found itself isolated before eventually agreeing on the compromise.
The French president is seldom shy of saying aloud what he thinks, even if it upsets others or comes across as pushy. “I was always pictured as the bad guy in the room,” Macron said unapologetically of his stance on a Brexit extension. “I endorse such a role, because I think it is a big mistake to procrastinate.”
So what would Macron’s approach to a Johnson prime ministership be? Aides point out that he is always ready to work with any democratically legitimate leader, however divergent his or her views. In some respects, and despite his reputation, Macron is in fact unusually Anglophile, and certainly Anglophone. Unlike previous French presidents who refused to speak English, and certainly not on French soil, Macron has no hang-ups about doing so.
He has a deep respect for the British security and intelligence forces, and values the bilateral Franco-British defence relationship. A child of the Somme, Macron is well aware of France’s historical debt to the British. As I discovered while researching my book on Macron, he even has a British great-grandfather, George Robertson, who was a butcher from Bristol and married a Frenchwoman in Abbeville, near Amiens, after serving in World War One.
YET Macron is also a passionate pro-European, driven by his ambitions — however much they have been frustrated even by his continental partners — to integrate the EU further. If he takes a tough line over Brexit, it is partly to send a domestic political message: that leaving the club means losing the benefits of membership, and not just escaping the obligations. But primarily it is because Macron is fed up with the long, agonising process draining resources and energy away from the schemes he has in mind. “I do not want the subject of Brexit to block us on this point,” as he put it this year.
In other words, for all Johnson’s threats about refusing to pay the £39 billion Brexit bill, or fantasies about reopening the withdrawal agreement, putting a limit on the Irish
backstop, or even beginning trade talks before the withdrawal agreement is adopted, Macron will refuse to be bullied. The French economy would suffer too if this meant no deal, but the country is better prepared for it than it was earlier this year. And the view in Paris is that a no-deal exit would prompt such chaos in the UK that the shock would focus and change political minds.
Today, Macron looks less isolated than he was during the last EU talks on extending the Brexit deadline. But would he really refuse another extension if Johnson asked for one? Ultimately, the president is too much of a consensus-seeking European to wield a veto, De Gaulle-style. But any such request would need to be backed by a credible plan, such as holding a referendum or a general election. Macron will talk tough. But he is also wary of the EU getting the blame if Britain crashed out.
What of the chemistry between the pair? I suspect that, for all the evident irritation in Paris, Macron will make sure during his first meeting with Johnson that there is plenty of backslapping bonhomie. There will be amiable words about close neighbours, linked people, common crosschannel ancestry, and joint strategic interests.
Macron, after all, approached even Donald Trump with flattery and warmth. So far, this has secured him little in return from the American president. But it is how the French president approaches new bilateral relationships, and he is likely to try the same with Johnson.
Don’t confuse such displays of goodwill, however, with the prospect of a softer stance on Brexit, or a willingness to bend principles Macron stuck to when Theresa May was still in Downing Street.
⬤ Sophie Pedder is The Economist Paris bureau chief and author of Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the quest to reinvent a nation (Bloomsbury, 2018), now out in a revised paperback edition
Aides say Macron will work with any democratically legitimate leader, however divergent their views