Emmanuel Macron holds Britain’s Brexit fate in his hands | 3 September 2018

C.S. Forester, creator of Hornblower, a great student of Anglo-French relations, wrote a now often overlooked exhortative novel titled Death to the French. Contemporary readers might consider it triggering if not racist, yet it captures well a traditional British reaction when angry Frenchmen start throwing missiles at us. Here in the south of France we are some distance from the troubled waters of the Guerre de Coquilles Saint Jacques. On the shores of the Mediterranean, oysters are favoured and war fever muted, although nobody at Chez Trini’s café doubts that the perfidious English are up to their usual conneries. I tend to agree, but then I’m applying for an Irish passport (thanks to my Belfast-born grandmother). Hedging my bets, I am no longer 100 per cent committed to batting for Britain, especially not over a scallop. Irrespective of my own views of the rights and wrongs in the Bay of the Seine, and honestly unfamiliar with the details, I’m betting on the French to come off best in this skirmish.