France is furious at Boris’s quarantine decision

The French gently mocked the pop-singer Petula Clarke on French media in the 1970s for her contortions about her heart being English but her soul French, or was it the reverse? But however much the British metropolitan classes may cloy to France as a mythical ‘world they have lost’, the French perceive the Franco-British relationship very differently. Competition is the watchword. And it is sharp. General de Gaulle the most acute of politicians and contriving of historians remarked, when French policy in the 1960s called for Britain to be rejected from the Common Market: ‘Our hereditary enemy, it was not Germany, but England.’ Leaving aside the centuries old clichéd rivalry from William the Conqueror to the Entente Cordiale versus the millions of French deaths from three German-provoked wars in seventy years, the modern focus of Franco-British rivalry is on comparative GDP, public debt and, flippant as it may seem, rugby.