Jean-Marie Le Pen won’t be missed

Perhaps it’s tasteless to make the point that maybe nobody will be happier to see Jean-Marie Le Pen buried than his daughter Marine. The founder of the National Front died this morning at the age of 96, discredited, ignored, mentally incapacitated and largely irrelevant, except as a spectre. 

Today the terms ‘hard right’, ‘extreme right’ and ‘far right’ are often carelessly employed, but Len Pen père was all of these, a millstone for his daughter as she attempted to drag the party towards the mainstream and kick down the door of the Elysée Palace. Though it’s been years since his outbursts against Jews, Arabs and gays made headlines, it’s now sure there will be no more of them.

Marine was at war with her father for decades, finally expelling him from the National Front in 2005 after his repeated claims that the Holocaust was a ‘detail of history’.

She described her father’s behaviour as ‘political suicide’.