Jeremy Hunt

Sorry, France, I’m afraid you can’t have your cake and eat it

One of the French phrases I learnt quickly as foreign secretary was “On ne peut avoir le beurre et l’argent du beurre”, which literally means “you can’t have the butter and the money from selling it”. A more familiar translation would be “you can’t have your cake and eat it” – and this was the message that France hammered home with boring repetitiveness during the Brexit negotiations.

With the diplomatic row over the cancellation of their Australian submarine contract, it is time that the French reflected on this saying themselves.

Many have wondered why their ambassador to Britain was not recalled, unlike those to America and Australia. The French Foreign Minister, Jean Yves Le Drian, has described this as the UK accepting “vassal status” to the US, but says their ambassador to London was not recalled because we were only a minor player, the “spare wheel” on a car being driven by Australia and the US.

Given that we are the second biggest military in Nato and will be helping to build Australia’s new nuclear-powered submarines, that bears no scrutiny. There is, in fact, a different reason, which is that France has long believed “Europe” should build an independent defence capability and is keen that Britain, with Europe’s largest military, should be part of it.

They know that freezing diplomatic relations with us would make that impossible. But they are also bitterly aware that our central involvement in a new Asian military alliance led by the US makes it much less likely that any European alliance, with or without Britain, would ever be a credible alternative to American leadership.

We have a long and successful military partnership with France dating back to the St Malo declaration signed by Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac in 1998. It has weathered many storms including Brexit and periods of poor chemistry between British and French leaders. Most recently, we supplied RAF Chinooks in support of French counter-terrorism operations in North Africa.

But the French are much more ambitious, particularly following Afghanistan, from which they have drawn the opposite lesson to us. While we believe that it shows the vulnerability of the West if the US is not more firmly anchored at the centre of an alliance of democracies, the French believe it confirms their long-held view of the US as an unreliable leader.

Which is why they would love the Brits to be part of their alternative European defence alliance. And also why they, too, need to understand why you can’t have your cake and eat it. For them it has always been taken for granted that, whatever economic pain they seek to inflict on Britain, we can always be counted on as a reliable security ally in the defence of Europe. The best example of this was asking Britain to join a security alliance at the same time as offering an investment deal to China which granted it better access to the single market than us.

But how you behave in one element of a relationship of course affects the whole. The French seem to think that, no matter their utter inflexibility in the Brexit negotiations, leading to the fall of a British government; no matter their determination to make sure that Brexit leaves a permanent economic scar in Northern Ireland which could fracture the Union; no matter even their threats to our electricity supply – in the end Britain will line up meekly alongside France in their military ambitions for Europe. It is the ultimate example of European cakeism.

But relationships don’t work like that. Our defence relationship with France is deep, strategic and important. But it will only move to another level if France stops treating us as a renegade state needing to be punished for Brexit and instead as an independent, equal sovereign power.

The French view has always been that Brexit was a British choice and we have no right to ask others to make choices. Fair enough – but now perhaps they will realise that in a relationship of equals both sides have to show give and take.