Macron’s Faustian pact with the EU

On Wednesday, the new French Prime Minister Jean Castex made his general policy statement to the National Assembly. We know things are getting serious in France because the new Prime Minister was wearing a proper suit: charcoal-grey, well-cut, elegant. No more of the boyband blue drainpipe little numbers sported by his predecessor, tailored to Macron’s foppish programme of France as a ‘start-up nation’.

Castex’s audience of face-masked députés – including the communists to the left of him, wearing bright red face coverings – barracked him throughout. Unperturbed, his southern singing accent cut through the catcalls with repeated appeals to the ‘Republic’, ‘France’ and ‘unity’ in the face of the worst recession since world war two and projected autumn social unrest. The 55-year-old Castex is solid, reliable and a fixer. In this he resembles his 1976 predecessor Raymond Barre, of whom it was said, he was ‘a four-square mind in a round body’.