The trouble with calling everyone ‘far right’

There is a favourite Fleet Street story about the legendary Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie. While editing the paper, he discovered that his horoscope writer was recycling copy. He decided to dispense with her services in a letter that opened: ‘As you will no doubt have foreseen…’

You do not have to hold claims to being a mystic to predict certain things. The results of last week’s EU elections were easily predictable, as was the response from much of the British media. As I uncannily prophesied in last week’s column, the BBC’s Europe editor, Katya Adler, went with: ‘The far right is on the march.’ Elsewhere, she offered the claim that people across the continent often say: ‘This feels like the Europe of the 1930s.’

I don’t know if the BBC’s Europe editor often visits Europe. But having swung through five European countries in the week before the EU elections, I did not hear the sound of jackboots anywhere.

If they existed, you would hear them especially loudly on the streets of Paris, since the city has been made pretty much impossible to get around except on foot. Emmanuel Macron wanted the Olympics to take place in the centre of the city and he seems to be learning the hard way why most host cities stick the games away on the periphery. Apart from making Paris almost impassable, he has set up a terrific security risk. An ‘Islamist inspired’ attack on the games has already been foiled. Paris, even more than most European cities, is in a state of permanent high alert.

In any case, the success of the National Rally in the EU elections was not put down to any failings of President Macron, but rather to the infamous march of ‘the far right’.