Fishing for votes: what’s really behind our trade war with France?

A decade ago, French-bashing was all the rage. David Cameron famously declared Britain would ‘roll out the red carpet’ for those fleeing the steep tax hikes proposed by the newly elected Socialist president François Hollande. The French economy continued to be a source of derision for the British, culminating in the managing director of John Lewis describing it as ‘sclerotic, hopeless and downbeat’ in October 2014. The following month, Hollande despatched his 37-year-old English-speaking economy minister to London with instructions to prove to the British that the French economy was in good health. That minister was Emmanuel Macron. ‘Whether we like it or not, the Anglo-Saxon press are the opinion-formers in Europe,’ he told the travelling French press corps. ‘So if these opinion-formers continue to say that France isn’t reforming, then that is how we will be perceived.’

Macron has never liked the influence and impertinence of the British press, which partly explains why he doesn’t ‘get’ Boris Johnson, who was once one of those ‘opinion-formers’. Macron is more comfortable in the company of the technocracy, those grey men and women that western European nations produce so well, graduates of institutions such as the École nationale d’administration in Strasbourg, the alma mater of Macron, French Prime Minister Jean Castex and Macron’s Europe minister Clément Beaune.

Johnson, on the other hand, knows how to rile technocrats. He spent five years as a journalist in Brussels, filing articles about how the European Union was getting in a muddle about ‘new specifications for condom dimensions’. These were the opinions that helped form the majority British view about the need to leave the EU.