It’s no state secret that Britain was outmanoeuvred by France at last week’s European Summit. The Old Foe triumphed and their political establishment has been, in the words of Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, farting in our general direction ever since. President Sarkozy has described David Cameron as an indignant child and the Parisian equivalent of Mervyn King has insisted that Britain’s credit rating be downgraded.
We British are renowned for our stoicism, but there are limits. The Foreign Office has rebuffed the garlic-infused petulance wafting across La Manche: literary Tory minister Keith Simpson has
produced his customary holiday reading list and it contains a few putdowns for our Gallic cousins. Take, for instance, this section of Simpson’s witty and informative blurb:
‘It would be fair to say that Franco-British relations have had their ups and downs and at the time of writing there have been one or two little local difficulties. James Barr, who worked for
Francis Maude ten years ago, has been fascinated with European rivalries in the Middle East. In 2007 he wrote Setting the Desert on Fire: T E Lawrence and Britain’s Secret War in Arabia
1916-18. Franco-British rivalry is the subject of his latest book A Line in the Sand Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East (£25) which is based upon French memoirs and
archival sources. Both France and Britain were prepared to support and arm terrorist/independence movements in each other’s sphere of influence.
Peter Mangold, journalist and author, shows in his Britain and the Defeated French: From Occupation to Liberation, 1940-1944 (£18.99) the ambivalent British attitude both to the Vichy and
Free French, and how those wartime relationships resonate today – something for President’s Sarkozy’s stocking?’
What fun. Simpson has compiled an enthralling list ; those whose present-buying has not gone according to plan should refer to it as a matter of urgency.
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