Why is Liz Truss playing Emmanuel Macron’s game?

Is Emmanuel Macron a friend of the United Kingdom? Liz Truss said over the summer that she didn’t know, which was a reasonable response in the circumstances. This is a president surrounded by close advisors who hold Britain in barely disguised contempt.

Other than a brief pretend bromance with Boris Johnson, whom Macron promptly knifed in the back and called a clown, the president threatened to cut the electricity interconnection between France and Britain in a row over fish. His government takes millions from Britain in return for pretending to stop boatloads of migrants launching themselves across the channel. Macron has described Nato as brain dead and fantasised that its security role could be Europeanised. Beyond the rhetorical, his contribution to the Ukrainian war effort has been negligible.

Macron’s response to Truss’s uncertainty about him was to declare that her ambivalence would provoke serious problems.