Jealous French will never be our true friends
DESPITE the many shared challenges that confront us – Islamic extremism, climate change, Covid, the refugee crisis and a bullying Russia – the French president, Emmanuel Macron, seems determined to make life as difficult for our post-brexit Britain as he can.
It has just emerged that, earlier this year, he diverted nearly five million Covid vaccine doses that were meant for us.
This was when Britain’s own vaccine rollout programme had pulled way ahead of the EU’S, provoking jealousy and fury on the Continent and among “Rejoiners”.
Now French officials are threatening to cut cross-channel energy supplies because their fishermen no longer have unrestricted access to British waters. Those fishermen are also threatening to blockade the Channel Tunnel.
The list goes on.
The French were the driving force behind the troublesome Northern Ireland Protocol and have since been rigid in applying it. And Mr Macron’s new defence deal with Greece, which undermines the cohesion of Nato, is probably a response to the Aukus pact that Britain and the US have struck with Australia, which cancelled its £72billion submarine contract with France as a result.
So what lies behind this outright hostility? Partly, of course, vengeance over our decision to leave the EU. Mr Macron is a committed EU federalist who wants to deter any other member states from following our own independent path.
But the truth is that successive French governments – or rather elements within them – have been covertly working against the interests of this country, while paying their respects to “EU solidarity”.
When, a few years ago, I researched a book on post-war Anglo-french relations, I was amazed to discover a rarely acknowledged latent influence in France. French suspicion, fear and jealousy of “the Anglo-saxons”, a vague term that denotes the English-speaking influences mainly of Britain and America. These are deemed to pose a challenge to the French language as well as France’s interests.
Earlier this year Macron apologised to the Rwandans for France’s “heavy and overwhelming responsibility” in the 1994 genocide, in which 800,000 were slaughtered.
He did not mention, however, that the perpetrators had support in Paris because they were deemed to be enemies of “the Anglosaxons”. One senior influence in Paris at the time, for example, was Bruno Delaye, who noted with alarm “the complicity of the Anglo-saxon world” in supporting other neighbouring states.
But there are historical reasons why Britain arouses particular jealousy in France. It was England that defeated Joan of Arc and Napoleon, shattered its army at Agincourt, stole its Empire and, in the Second World War, liberated it from Nazi rule.
It was such sentiments that led, for example, to “the last Anglofrench war” in the late 1960s, as de Gaulle’s government secretly armed separatists in Nigeria, fuelling a civil war against a regime strongly supported by London.
This caused severe tension between London and Paris, adding to the animosity over de Gaulle’s vetoes of our attempts to join the Common Market.
Another example was the Falklands War. When the Argentines invaded, in May 1982, President Mitterrand’s government promised not to supply them with any more of the deadly planes and missiles that threatened to obliterate the British fleet.
But on June 10, a telegram from British Intelligence was brought to Margaret Thatcher’s attention: a British agent had caught sight of three French bombers being smuggled into Argentina. Ministers and diplomats scrambled to phone Paris and get the operation aborted.
The French deal was almost certainly done with a nod and a wink from officials in Paris, where South American markets were regarded as highly lucrative and anti-british sentiment was rife. Some leading figures openly condemned the war, including a minister who criticised the “self-importance” of a power that has “contempt for every aspect of the Latin people”. And soon after the conflict began, a French team arrived in Argentina to help its air force to fit Frenchmade missiles to their planes.
So no matter how arduous our “winter of discontent” may turn out to be, we must assume that Mr Macron will do everything he can to make things even worse.
Dealing with this will require determination, as well as tact, from the current government.
Macron wants to deter any other state from leaving the EU