Macron’s interior minister unlikely to help resolve impasse
Gerald Darmanin has been at the centre of several cross-channel rows, and is rarely sympathetic to UK
The thousands of Britons caught up in the chaos at the Port of Dover should not be shocked to find Gerald Darmanin at the centre of the travel disruptions.
The French interior minister has fully embraced Emmanuel Macron’s anti-british, anti-brexit policies, where engineered cross-channel rows have been frequently used to shore up domestic support.
When it comes to Brexit, the Elysée’s position is to deliberately go out of its way to demonstrate that Britain’s decision to quit the European Union and sign a free-trade deal with the bloc must come with pain, even where there should be no little or no consequence.
Attempts to trigger trade wars in post-brexit disputes over fishing rights and Northern Ireland have all had Paris at the heart of them.
President Macron and his allies sought to discredit the efficacy of the Oxford-astrazeneca coronavirus jab, before eventually leading a failed effort to stop shipment of some five million doses produced in a Dutch factory to Britain.
When supporters of Liverpool and Real Madrid were pepper-sprayed and robbed by locals at the Champions League final in Paris, Mr Darmanin instantly blamed “thousands of British supporters” for the horrifying scenes outside the Stade de France in May.
A French Senate inquiry into the chaos directly criticised the 39-yearold interior minister for issuing erroneous statements and blaming Liverpool fans to “divert attention” from a string of failures by the organisers and police. Mr Darmanin’s handling of the Channel migrant crisis has been similarly shambolic. Last year it was reported the French were letting illegal small boats cross to the UK “as a punishment for Brexit”.
After the deaths of 27 migrants in November 2021, he refused to engage in talks over an Anglo-french deal to prevent more tragedies, because relations between Britain and France were not “normal”.
The minister tweeted: “When Mr Johnson says that France must ‘take back its migrants’, what he is really asking is for France to exonerate him from any responsibility for receiving them. The British Government must take responsibility.”
His controversies, however, don’t stop at taking aim at Britain. When he was brought into Mr Macron’s government in 2020, he was under investigation for alleged rape. Earlier this month, the five-year investigation into claims by Sophie Patterson-spatz of rape and sexual harassment were dropped by a Paris judge.
Given his history, the interior minister is unlikely to find a pragmatic solution to the chaos in Dover.