Annals of French Diplomacy

Friday, 9th December 2011

This is scarcely the most important part of today's EU shenanigans but, post DSK and all that, one must admire French diplomatic flair when it comes to this sort of thing:

The French are very angry – one French diplomat says that Britain is acting "like a man who wants to go to a wife-swapping party without taking his own wife".

Correct or not, this is nicely put. One's hard-pressed to imagine an FCO or State Department suit expressing his frustration in quite such colourful terms. The temptation to make sweeping nationalist generalisations on the back of an off-the-cuff remark such as this should, naturally, be resisted.

[Thanks to LM]

Filed under: Britain (738 more articles) , Diplomacy (75 more articles) , Europe (749 more articles) , France (246 more articles)

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fergus pickering

December 9th, 2011 2:33pm Report this comment

We do not go to wife-swapping parties. Neither, I'll wager, does Angela Merkel. But those filthy French are all deviants. What can you expect?

and I'll go to bed at noon

December 9th, 2011 6:08pm Report this comment

Actually, I've always thought of wife-swapping as a particularly British brand of kink, being furtive and suburban in nature. Anyway, apparently the French aren't the only ones running with this dubious metaphor. According to the BBC, Simon Miller, editor of Financial Risks Today, said:

"The 'historic' agreement between the eurozone and europlus countries may have pleased Sarkozy, but with no real action plan announced, Britain is better off not putting its keys in the fruit bowl."

I'm not entirely clear who Cameron's "wife" is in this context, though. Clegg?

Yow Min Lye

December 10th, 2011 7:37am Report this comment

Perhaps we British are just happy with the wife we already have, as well as the thousand year-long marriage we have made together - stormy though it may have been at times.

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