How cool is Macron?

For a man with a reputation as a bit of an egghead, Emmanuel Macron has acquired a sudden passion for sport. In recent weeks, he’s been seen at rugby matches and football internationals, invited the Lyon women’s football team to the Élysée Palace to celebrate their Champions League win, and found time to chat with Chris Froome during the cyclist’s ride to a fourth Tour de France title. He’s even donned boxing gloves and sparred with a young pugilist as a means of promoting Paris’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics.

The message from the 39-year-old Macron is clear, as crystal as Tony Blair’s when he was elected British prime minister in 1997, having courted sports idols and rock stars during his campaign: I am young, I am dynamic and I am a new leader for a new age. Like Blairism, Macron’s pitch is aimed at an international audience. Unlike Blairism, it’s not necessarily off to a flying start.

In those early years, Britain couldn’t get enough of Blair, and his carefully crafted Cool Britannia captured the imagination of a country where the spread of the internet  created opportunities for edgy innovation. Tony was refreshing, a welcome injection of pizzazz after the grey years of John Major’s premiership, and he was seen as the right man for the new millennium, a leader interested in the future and not in the past. Across the Channel, the French could only look on in envy, ruled as they were by President Jacques Chirac, then 65, a career politician with questionable ethics, whose main cultural interest was ancient Japanese art.

Envious the French might have been, but they were also in awe of Cool Britannia and a new expression entered their lexicon — ‘So British’, as in quirky, irreverent and typical of those cool cats on the other side of the Channel.