Why doesn’t Emmanuel Macron like Britain?

Why is Emmanuel Macron raging against Britain? The French president has returned to the subject of the British once again in the course of his Great National Debate. To be honest, thus far this has been something of a great Macron soliloquy, as he finds it difficult to stop talking. It was inevitable that during one of his lengthy televised discourses (there have now been three) he would turn once again to his new favourite subject, and so he did.

As he strutted across the stage in Drôme, holding forth to an audience of local worthies that looked more bemused than enthusiastic, Macron declared that the British were mad, their referendum proof that referendums are rubbish, that Brexit is unachievable, that the British notion of independence from the EU was demented, and that British society was tearing itself apart. This, apropos of Macron’s belief in the EU, and only the EU, as the ultimate guarantor of security and freedom. 

We can put to one side the irony that in Brexit Britain, police are not yet firing gas cylinders at rioters burning bankers’ Porsches, although defacement of national memorials seems a tale of two cities.