The humourless French will never ‘get’ your prime minister

“Can you come on our show?” The France 5 TV booker sounded frazzled. “Would you explain why we should be afraid of Boris Johnson?” “Er,” I said. “That’s our title tonight. ‘ Pourquoi faut-il avoir peur de Boris Johnson?’ You write for the same paper, yes?”

This was the start of my new and improved television career, which I entirely owe to Bojo. I have become, by default, the French Boris Whisperer, because, to my compatriots, the PM is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. They see him as the exact opposite of what a politician should be: it’s hard to imagine someone more different from Emmanuel Macron while still belonging to the same species. Now the two are meeting on Thursday at the Elysee, and my only advice to Macron is: take an interpreter.

I should confess that I’ve met Boris Johnson only once, at a Spectator summer party, where he was holding court next to a fountain of Pol Roger, and probably did not even register my presence. He was having fun, and people enjoyed seeing him having fun. “It’s one of the reasons he is so popular,” I recently told a radio host, who looked at me as if I’d sprouted fins or spoken Székely Hungarian. “It’s been three years of bumbling and gloom, and voters like a bit of optimism.”

“But why does he joke? Ce n’est pas sérieux.” Humour in France is as regulated as the Common Agricultural Policy: off the cuff is more likely to get you fired than elicit a chuckle. It’s impossible to get the French to even conceive that not being “sérieux” can be a politician’s raison d’être (and a vote winner). The great post-war editor of Le Monde used to tell his journalists to write “boringly”, as any hint of fantasy would destroy the paper’s credibility. Selfdeprecation here amounts to self-sabotage: any hint that you’ve “dabbled” rather

than sweated blood and tears over your 600-page history of the late Middle-Ages is taken literally, with your interlocutor’s eyes looking frantically for some less weird person to talk to.

“Are Boris’s jokes funny?” I get asked. (Yes, I say. Then I’m asked to translate things like “an inverted pyramid of piffle” to uncomprehending glares.) Or: “Why is he so untidy?” You need more than a sound bite to develop the Lord Emsworth theory of dressing down, so I explain that the English find dapper men more suspicious than someone whose shirt tails seem to escape from his trousers of their own volition. It goes down like un ballon en plomb.

The French notion of a prime ministerial first speech is something like Macron’s staged 2017 drama: dressed in a dark coat styled after François Mitterrand’s, the new president crossed the floodlit Louvre Court alone, to address the crowds from a dais, delivering the kind of flowery discourse that, translated into English, sounds like a press release from the Ruritanian Embassy: technocratic, vague and bombastic. Boris’s gung-ho address in front of No 10 bemused us: it was practical and upbeat, “like a campaign speech”, people said dismissively.

The vast majority of the French, however, have never actually heard Boris speak; they rely on bland voice-over snippets. The new generation of educated French pols think they can speak English. What they actually speak is Globish – syntactically correct but with no understanding of the assumptions shared by British speakers.

Negotiations will be an uphill task for both sides. The Germans don’t get British humour, but at least they are aware there is something there, so they are more careful. I hate to say this, but it’s Merkel and von der Leyen who may give decent Brexit concessions to Boris, not Macron.