It’s no state secret that Britain was outmanoeuvred by France at last week’s European Summit. The Old Foe triumphed and their political establishment has been, in the words of Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, farting in our general direction ever since. President Sarkozy has described David Cameron as an indignant child and the Parisian equivalent of Mervyn King has insisted that Britain’s credit rating be downgraded.
We British are renowned for our stoicism, but there are limits. The Foreign Office has rebuffed the garlic-infused petulance wafting across La Manche: literary Tory minister Keith Simpson has
produced his customary holiday reading list and it contains a few putdowns for our Gallic cousins. Take, for instance, this section of Simpson’s witty and informative blurb:
‘It would be fair to say that Franco-British relations have had their ups and downs and at the time of writing there have been one or two little local difficulties.
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