We all know what ‘vigorous exchange of views’ means. But rarely can a summit have ended with both sides boasting that their chap managed to get some juicy insults past the other fellow. Reading the press coverage on both sides of the Channel, a cartoon-like picture emerges. One imagines Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac like two Asterix characters, purple with rage, leaning towards each other with their noses squashed together.
This is not the first Anglo-French diplomatic row, of course. Lord Palmerston, on being told by his counterpart that the English had no word equivalent to the French ‘sensibilitZ’, replied, ‘Yes we have: humbug.’ And Winston Churchill had furious arguments with Charles de Gaulle, once telling him: ‘Ecoutez-moi, Monsieur le GZnZral, et markez mes mots: si vous me double-crosserez, je vous liquidaterai.’
Yet there is something curious about the Blair-Chirac estrangement. Both men have gone out of their way to bring their countries closer together; Blair as the most pro-European prime minister since Edward Heath, Chirac as the first French leader to talk seriously about rejoining the Nato command. Each is comfortable in the other’s language, and they share a pragmatic – or, if you prefer, opportunistic – approach to politics. Why have these two obvious soul mates fallen out?
On one level, the scrap was about farming. Blair, like all British politicians, wants to wind down the Common Agricultural Policy, while Chirac, like all French ones, wants to keep it. Having done a great deal over the years to cosy up to Paris, Blair was rather cross to find that Chirac had gone behind his back and struck a deal to keep the subsidies flowing from British consumers to his own farmers.
In the background, though, is the perennial question of the United Kingdom’s place in Europe.
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