What progressives can learn from France’s straight-talking communists

The latest poll has France’s socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo on 1.5 per cent. This is the party that won the presidential election a decade ago. Britain’s Labour party should look at the French socialists and be very afraid. This is what happens when a political party turns its back on its core electorate and instead panders to pet progressive policies, such as whether a woman can have a penis.

Things have become so bad for Hidalgo that she now trails Fabien Roussel of the French Communist party. Named in honour of Colonel Fabien, a communist hero of the resistance in the second world war, Roussel caused a kerfuffle in January when he declared in an interview that ‘good wine, good meat, good cheese, for me this is French gastronomy’.

For millions of other French, too, Monsieur Roussel. But not the joyless fanatics, mainly middle-class metropolitan types who this century have seized control of the British and French left.