After months of inbound slings and arrows, Emmanuel Macron, powdered by the star dust of the royal visit, relaunched himself on Sunday night. His presidential address from the Elysée Palace was officially described as an interview but the French journalists who were on set posing the questions were purely props. The star of the show was Macron.
Macron ignored and patronised Anne-Claire Coudray, a Grande Dame of French television. ‘Attendez, attendez,’ he ordered her at one point, when she dared to ask him a question. Not that he paid much more attention to the handsomely coiffed Laurent Delahousse, another establishment French TV journalist.
The president talked incessantly. He has mastered the actor’s art of never pausing for breath. His message, entirely undisputed by his interlocutors, was a very lightly modified ‘tout est parfait’. And where, due to events beyond the president’s control, things might not be precisely so great, it wasn’t his fault.
Perhaps a better comparison to Macron is AA Milne’s irrepressible Tigger from The House at Pooh Corner
Macron launched his show by recalling his recent moment of glory, the royal state visit.
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