My daughter’s Christmas won’t quite be the same this year. She and I are in England but her French mother has been prevented from making the trip by her president. It’s a funny world when hundreds of people can quite easily cross illegally from France to England in small boats – 1,200 in four days last week – but a mother isn’t allowed to take a train to be with her daughter at Christmas.
But that is France for you in what Macron’s opponents call his ‘Covid Dictatorship’. Even so his authoritarian measures are doing him and his country a fat lot of good. Yesterday France recorded 91,000 new cases of Covid, around the same as England, this contaminated little island that Macron so hates. One might have hoped such vertiginous figures would prompt a rethink in the Élysée. Has it occurred to Macron that perhaps Covid passports aren’t the answer? They were introduced in July and what have they achieved, other than to segregate France?
So Macron’s solution is to tighten restrictions still further.
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