Michel Barnier, the OAP appointed yesterday as Prime Minister of France, is a sensible fellow, even if at 73 he should be putting up his feet after decades in the political trenches. And he has plenty of pensions to draw on.
He’s not exciting. Scandal free, socially conservative, a master of dossiers – not intrigue, he’s not even a graduate of the École National d’Administration, the finishing school of the French elite. He’s a former choir boy and Scout who seems never to have made a memorable speech in his long career. He’s rather boring, and normal. His two memorable achievements seem to have been as the EU’s Brexit negotiator, in which he ran circles around Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and as the organiser of the Albertville Winter Olympic Games in 1992. He’s a competent technocrat. But a colourless politician.
Barnier looks likely to have the shortest political honeymoon in the Fifth Republic
But Barnier’s unpredicted ascent to the Hôtel Matignon has concealed an even more remarkable turn.
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