Gavin Mortimer

Europe is on a state of high alert after Friday’s Islamist attack in Moscow that left 137 concertgoers dead. France has raised its security alert to the highest level, and more soldiers will be deployed to patrol the streets and stand guard outside ‘sensitive sites’ including churches, synagogues and schools. President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement on Sunday that the group that carried out the Moscow attack, Islamic State – Khorasan Province (IS-K), an Afghan affiliate of the Islamic State, had attempted to commit ‘several’ atrocities on French soil in recent months, including an attack in the city of Strasbourg. Will border controls be tightened? It would be futile. The Islamist threat is already here Denmark has also stepped up security, as has Italy.

Emmanuel Macron showed off his virility this week with the release of two photos in which he is seen giving a punchbag his best shots. Is Vladimir Putin scared? More to the point, will the drug cartels of Marseille be frightened into submission by the Elysee Palace’s very own Rocky? The day before the publication of the photos, Macron visited Marseille, his thirteenth visit to the Mediterranean city in seven years. As usual, the president swung by to talk tough about the deadly violence that has gripped the city for years. Last year, 49 people were shot dead in tit-for-tat killings among rival drug gangs, and 123 were wounded.

Last week on Spectator TV Fraser Nelson saluted the ‘intervention’ of the Labour party in the debate about whether the magazine he edits, as well as the Telegraph Media Group, should be sold to a UAE-backed consortium. In an interview, Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow culture secretary said that ‘ownership by a foreign power is incompatible with press freedom, which is essential in a democracy’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXRdmMyD8uc We shouldn’t have been surprised at Labour’s championing of press freedom, even for publications in the Conservative stable. The party’s leader, Keir Starmer, has written more than a dozen columns for the Telegraph. The most recent was last December when he accused the Tories of having betrayed voters on immigration.

There was good and bad news for the European Union last week: the number of migrants arriving in Europe on the Central Mediterranean route in the first two months of 2024 dropped 70 per cent compared to the same period the previous year, the latest figures revealed. The bad news was that they were up 117 per cent on the eastern Mediterranean route. The really bad news was that they were up 541 per cent on the West African route as Malians, Senegalese and Mauritanians arrived in large numbers on Spanish territory. The nationalities crossing the Eastern Mediterranean in the greatest number are Afghans, Syrians and Egyptians.

France host England tonight in the final match of the 2024 Six Nations. ‘Le Crunch’, as this fixture has come to be known, is never for the faint-hearted but this evening’s atmosphere is likely to be especially febrile. The match is being played in Lyon, in the south-east of France, instead of the Stade de France in the north of Paris. There’ll be 20,000 fewer fans because of Lyon’s smaller stadium but the noise they will generate will be far greater than the corporate crowd in Paris. Lyon is rugby territory. There are several famous clubs within a 100 mile radius and the chance to barrack les Rosbifs ­– the French retort to being known as ‘frogs’ – will be accepted with glee.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to the French press this week and passed on a message to the people. ‘Your children are not going to die in Ukraine,’ he said. He made his remarks 24 hours before the French parliament voted on a bilateral security agreement that Zelensky signed with President Emmanuel Macron last month. The vote, which went the way of the government by 372 to 99, is symbolic but it allowed parliament to voice their opposition to Macron’s recent belligerent rhetoric towards Russia. The left-wing La France Insoumise voted against the agreement, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally abstained.

Relations between German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron have always been strained but they’re now positively hostile. Media on both sides of the Rhine have laid bare the differences that exist between the two men. Der Spiegel calls it a ‘battle of egos’, while Bild recently ran an article headlined ‘The Dangerous Ice Age’.   Analysing the reason for the glacial relationship that exists between Macron and Scholz, Bild highlighted their different natures: Scholz was ‘stiff, often hesitant, but in the end mostly true to his word’, and a leader who had more faith in the Americans and the British than his EU partners. Macron, on the other hand, is an ‘instinctive president who loves the grand gesture more than the small print’.

Britain and its government has a well deserved reputation for kow-towing to foreign investors. But even they (one hopes) would draw a line at allowing a Middle East state to set up shop in the Royal Hospital Chelsea. In France, however, Emmanuel Macron’s government is studying a request from Saudi Arabia to erect its Olympic village in the Invalides during the Paris Olympics this summer.   The site is sacred for the French military. As well as housing the country’s national army museum, it is the site of the Institution Nationale des Invalides, the equivalent of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and is also home to a necropolis containing the tomb of Napoleon.

Emmanuel Macron is the first president of the Fifth Republic to have never served in the military, and it shows. His bellicose declaration on Monday that the West might deploy ground troops to Ukraine has been roundly rejected by France’s allies. No chance, was the retort of Germany, Britain, Poland and others. Russia also warned that such a deployment would be very unwise. Macron has never recovered the confidence of his armed forces As a result, Macron has been left looking foolish and inexperienced, accused of war-mongering in order to boost his self-esteem after a bruising few weeks domestically.

Emmanuel Macron has said that the West may have to send ground troops to Ukraine to support their war against Russia. The president of France made his comments on Monday as he hosted a conference at the Elysée palace about how best to support Ukraine. In attendance were more than 20 European heads of state and government, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, as well as representatives from the USA and Canada. The cynic might wonder if Macron’s grandstanding isn’t a last desperate attempt to claw back some authority before June’s European elections Macron admitted that there was not a consensus on deploying ground troops to Ukraine but ‘no option should be discarded. We will spare no effort to ensure that Russia does not emerge victorious in this conflict’.

What links Rishi Sunak to Elly Schlein, the leader of the Italian left, and Raphaël Glucksmann, the great hope of the French Socialist party? America. The British Prime Minister lived in the US for a number of years, first as a student at Stanford University before working for a hedge fund in California. Schlein, born and educated in Switzerland, is the daughter of an American academic who cut her political teeth as a staffer on both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. The 44-year-old Glucksmann, born in the posh part of Paris to a prominent philosopher, has never lived in the States but he’s been a frequent visitor over the years.