Shared Opinion | 3 May 2008

Gordon can barely speak English either, so why don’t we swap him for Sarkozy?

Say what you like about Nicolas Sarkozy, but he’s a feisty little tyke, isn’t he? Apparently, he put himself through an hour-long grilling on French TV last week. We’ve got our issues with the strange angry man in Downing Street, but the French, they loathe Sarkozy. According to the blogs, he bore up pretty well. At one point, he responded to calls for a new dialogue with the Taleban. ‘Open a dialogue?’ he said. ‘With people who amputate the hand of a woman because she had varnish on her nails? Who have stopped millions of little girls from going to school? Who brought down Buddhas with hundreds of years of history? Who stone a so-called adulterous woman? I don’t think we have a lot to say.’

This is strong stuff. You may think he’s dead wrong. You may suspect that, as a Frenchman, he’d probably still be up for selling them guns and then running away if they fired them at him. Never mind that, for the moment. Just consider the demagoguery. It verges on the Churchillian. Couldn’t we use a bit of that over here? Those Frenchies, they don’t know what they’ve got. Eloquence, conviction and a clear sense of purpose. And they hate him for it. Such a waste. We’d have him. His saucy wife, too, if only for the outfits. It’s just a shame he can’t speak English without sounding like a man reading aloud from a parachute instruction manual, while falling out of a plane. It would never work.