The Spectator's Notes

16 February 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

None of this need matter much, perhaps, if reform were coming through. But that, too, is in some doubt. President Sarkozy’s equivalent of the Blair/Brown ‘big tent’ is called ‘l’ouverture’. One of his recruits is Jacques Attali, formerly chief adviser to the socialist President Mitterrand. M. Attali was charged by Sarko to produce a report on how to get economic growth going again. He has now done so, with more than 300 measures of liberalisation. On the day I went to see him (he was so frantically busy that he changed the location three times), I decided to walk because all the taxi-drivers were striking against his proposal to reduce their monopoly. Poor, exhausted M. Attali had a haunted look in his eyes at the scale of the task. That very evening, the government capitulated to the cabbies’ protests. Sarkozy came into office saying that he would be the President of ‘pouvoir d’achat’ (purchasing power), but now this power is dropping, and Sarko says ‘The tills are empty’. The municipal elections are due next month and the ‘hyper-President’ is suddenly seen as an electoral liability. If so, it is sad, because this strange, driven, erratic man seems to be the only person with any will to wake France out of her uneasy slumber.

Returning home to Archbishop Williams, I recalled a conversation with an Afghan nurse who did my company medical recently. She was a serious Muslim but, as her job and her habit of calling me ‘Mr Moore, darling’ suggest, not an extreme one. I asked her what she thought of Islamism. ‘Sharia?’ she exclaimed, in the accents of north London, ‘puh-lease! Having the English law is bad enough!’