How Britain and France learned to live with terror

Emmanuel Macron told his people last summer they would have to learn to live with Covid. A year-and-a-half on, France is unrecognisable to the country it once was: Covid passports are in force and face masks remain mandatory in many places. The president of France is not alone among Western leaders in his uncompromising approach to the pandemic: Holland, Austria and Germany are re-imposing restrictions and Boris Johnson, who used the ‘learn to live with it’ line in July, has refused to rule out a Christmas lockdown.

Yet while Europe’s presidents and prime ministers appear ready to go to any length to protect their people from this virus, their approach to another threat – the danger posed by Islamist terrorism – is far more insouciant.

In 2015, shortly after Islamists had slaughtered 130 people on the streets of Paris, Manuel Valls, the then prime minister of France, announced that this form of terrorism is ‘a lasting threat we are going to have to learn to live with’.