Gavin Mortimer is a British author who lives in Burgundy after many years in Paris. He writes about French politics, terrorism and sport.
When French prime minister Jean Castex and health minister Olivier Véran held a press conference last week, they outlined the timetable for a gradual easing of the country’s many Covid-19 restrictions. Véran talked of an ‘encouraging evolution’ in the fight against the virus, despite the fact that France had in the previous week recorded an average
If, as many are predicting, the wheels are about to come off Boris Johnson’s premiership, few world leaders will be as indifferent as Emmanuel Macron. He and the PM have rarely seen eye to eye. It may very well have been more than just a coincidence that Johnson yesterday declared Britain was ‘open for business’
The defection of Christian Wakeford to Labour has put a spring in the step of the left-wing party. Apparently it marks the start of their revival. Give it two years and Keir Starmer will be waving from the steps of Number 10. That’s one scenario. A more likely one is that the good people of
When the vaccine pass comes into effect later this week, I will not be able to enter a bar or a restaurant. I will not be able to visit a museum or go to the movies. I will not be able to watch a live sports event or attend a music concert. I will not
Who are the ten per cent of the French population that Emmanuel Macron wishes to ’emmerder’ or, as we say on this side on the Channel, ‘piss off’? It is a question that is rarely scrutinised, certainly by the foreign press. Are the refuseniks the Gallic answers to Novak Djokovic and Piers Corbyn? There is
The new year has not started well for Emmanuel Macron. It began badly when some bright spark in the Elysée thought it would be a good idea to mark France’s six-month presidency of the European Union by unfurling the bloc’s blue and gold flag under the Arc de Triomphe. Millions of French were not amused
My daughter’s Christmas won’t quite be the same this year. She and I are in England but her French mother has been prevented from making the trip by her president. It’s a funny world when hundreds of people can quite easily cross illegally from France to England in small boats – 1,200 in four days
Two years ago this week I wrote a piece for Coffee House entitled ‘Corbyn may be a goner but his ideology is as strong as ever’. The thrust of my argument was that gloating over the demise of Magic Grandpa and his Momentum mob was premature, and what we call woke culture was ‘no passing
Emmanuel Macron subjected France to a two-hour primetime television interview on Wednesday evening which must have been a pre-Christmas treat for the nation. Just under four million tuned in to see Macron discussing his achievements as president in what was a polished performance; not since Tony Blair has a world leader been such a consummate
Eric Zemmour enjoyed a propitious weekend as he embarked on his first official overseas visit as a presidential candidate. It began with the endorsement of Philippe de Villiers, an influential businessman and political commentator (and the brother of Pierre, the chief of the defence staff who quit in 2017 after falling out with Emmanuel Macron).
The best way to describe Valérie Pécresse is Emmanuel Macron in a blouse. The newly-elected candidate for Les Republicans (LR) swears she is the French president’s polar opposite, but ideologically there is little to separate the pair. The 54-year-old Pécresse, who will now stand against Macron in next year’s presidential election, has been on the
George W Bush will forever be in debt to The Donald. Before Trump became the 45th president of the United States, the man nicknamed ‘Dubya’ was widely considered by many Americans to be the most inept. Then came Trump. No longer was Bush a clown. The American left forget how they’d demonised him and looked
So it’s official: Eric Zemmour will stand as a candidate in next year’s French presidential election. It was hardly a shock when he launched his campaign this morning with a video that was the visual equivalent of a Michel Houellebecq novel. Nearly seven years ago, Houellebecq’s novel, Submission, depicted an incipient civil war in France
Last month on Coffee House I drew attention to the inconsistency in how Europe responded to the migrant crises in Belarus and France. Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, was accused of ‘weaponising’ Middle Eastern migrants seeking to enter Europe at his country’s border with Poland, but no government dared criticise France for the chaos
It’s not often you find Eric Zemmour plastered across the front of Closer magazine. Brigitte Macron, Beyonce and Lady Gaga are the preferred darlings of the celebrity magazine. But this week’s issue – which is selling like gâteaux chaud in France – has on its cover Zemmour and his 28-year-old paramour Sarah Knafo and underneath
Yesterday’s tragedy in the Channel has been ten years in the making. The British tabloids this morning are inevitably pointing the finger at the French for the deaths of 27 migrants who drowned after their dinghy sank not far from Calais, but that lets off the hook those who ultimately bear responsibility for the migrant
Right-wing Frenchman Eric Zemmour, who is expected to run for the presidency of his country next year, has been designated persona non grata in London by the city’s mayor. ‘Nobody who wants to divide our communities or incites hatred against people because of the colour of their skin or the god they worship is welcome in
Emmanuel Macron told his people last summer they would have to learn to live with Covid. A year-and-a-half on, France is unrecognisable to the country it once was: Covid passports are in force and face masks remain mandatory in many places. The president of France is not alone among Western leaders in his uncompromising approach to
It was hard not to laugh, coldly, at the statement from western members of the UN Security Council that condemned Belarus for engineering the migrant crisis on its border with Poland. Following Thursday’s emergency UN Security Council meeting, western members published a joint statement, accusing Belarus of putting migrants’ lives in danger ‘for political purposes’.
A day after the Israeli ambassador to Britain, Tzipi Hotovely, was harassed as she left the London School of Economics, a murder trial in France reached its grisly conclusion. Yacine Mihoub was handed a life term after being convicted of stabbing 85-year-old Mireille Knoll multiple times and then setting her body alight in March 2018.
