Macron has turned me into a Brexiteer

The arrogance of the EU establishment has finally convinced me I was wrong to view leaving as a mistake

In the end, he couldn’t help himself. Emmanuel Macron just had to mention Brexit in his traditional television New Year address to the nation. It was “born of many lies and false promises”, he said. Yes, Britons would remain “our neighbours, friends and allies”, but France’s sovereignty lay “in Europe”. In 2020, we had “protected our interests, our industries, our fishermen and our European unity”.

Macron faces an uphill re-election campaign a year from now. The youngest president of the French Republic ever, the first to wave as many blue-and-gold EU flags as tricolours during his 2017 campaign, he got the top job because he looked different from all the tired political warhorses from either side. But Macron has now lost his mojo: to gilets jaunes protests, pensions reform unrest, and Covid.

Each time, he was, with some reason, accused of being elitist, out of touch, contemptuous of the common people. He believes more European integration will save both France and his bacon (he doesn’t really see a difference). And increasingly, both his technocratic inclination and political calculations push him to Britain-bashing. Hence his vindictiveness in the last days before Boris Johnson’s Christmas deal, including the closure of the border.

At the last minute, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen had to take over the brunt of the negotiation, to prevent the no-deal the French professed to “prefer to a bad deal”. This outlook is largely due to the smug anti-british sentiment that has prevailed since the 2016 referendum among the French chattering classes, Macron’s natural habitat.

I remember, barely a week after the Leave victory, attending a public conference of Paris Europlace, the body representing the bulk of French financial institutions, most of which are peopled by technocrats like Macron. “We shall feast on the carcass of the City of London,” the Europlace then-president announced, to nearuniversal glee in the audience. The general attitude was “kick the Brits out, don’t yield an inch, they never were Europeans at heart”.

Over the past four and a half years, I have taken part in scores of French television debates, and the tone never varied. The notion of a choice motivated by a desire for political sovereignty was always pooh-poohed. Brexit was only ever a trick perpetrated to satisfy Boris’s naked ambition; a cruel joke played by an Eton-educated cynic and his cohorts.

As it happens, I’ve always seen Brexit as a bit of an own goal. It seemed to me that when you are the second or third-largest economy in the bloc, you can push things your way from the inside. I also saw the benefit of having a truly free-trading country, which also happened to be France’s only serious military partner, in the EU mix. But I have become so angry with the EU (and with my own country’s leaders) that my heart now supports the Brexiteers. After one too many television debates when, just because I tried to explain the Leavers’ motivations, I got talked down by assorted representatives of the European establishment, each more dismissive and smug than the other, the current omnishambles of the EU’S health policy power grab was the last straw.

Health remains broadly outside the purview of the EU – or at least it does for now. The collective purchasing of vaccines by the 27 was intended to show how much more efficient the EU would be than individual nations. But, as was superbly uncovered by the German news magazine Der Spiegel, this was one case of mission creep too far. While Britain started to vaccinate in droves, the EU’S vaccination campaign was delayed for weeks because they chose to buy from six suppliers equal amounts of doses even though three of those – national champions like France’s Sanofi – are years away from producing a vaccine.

Germany’s excellent health minister, Jens Spahn, eventually forced his government to buy separately tens of millions of Pfizer vaccine doses. I’m afraid we French went the opposite way. Our vaccination czar was wheeled out to say that it was a good thing that the process was so slow – just as back in March we were told that we didn’t need masks because we had none available – because the logistics chain for the Pfizer vaccine was not fit for purpose.

In both cases, we have needed the EU like a fish needs a bicycle. British friends, you were right all along.

follow AnneElisabeth Moutet on Twitter @moutet; read more at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion