France

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

The joy of French hospital food

After checking me in, the receptionist, who was wearing an overcoat, said: ‘There is no heating in the hotel. The unit is broken. But it is not cold today so you should be fine.’ Room 357 was cold. Hoping to raise the temperature by a degree, I filled the sink with hot water, turned on all the lights, and switched on the massive telly. It showed drug squad officers busting dealers in a poor northern French town. After combing through a suspect’s text messages, they bashed down his or her front door and arrested everybody and seized their drugs and cash. Most often it was hashish in small amounts and

Monday

Susanne Mundschenk

The fifth wave could break Macron

The fifth Covid wave has started in Europe. Some governments are already imposing lockdowns and wage cuts for the unvaccinated as hospitals are filling up. Mass protests against restrictions are popping up, some peaceful like in Austria, others turning violent like in the Netherlands and Belgium. A nationwide lockdown in Germany is unlikely, but local lockdowns may happen if hospitalisation rates continue to shoot up. Some patients in Bavaria have already been sent to Italian hospitals due to under-capacity, a reversal of what happened in the first wave. France is still counting on getting through the fifth wave with no restrictions. With only five months to go before the presidential

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Europe gripped by a fifth wave

How quickly things change. Just a month ago many EU countries were being praised for keeping some Covid restrictions in place, in many cases operating vaccine passport systems. By contrast, Britain was being attacked for removing most Covid restrictions in July. The UK suffering elevated infection rates ever since, leading to predictions that we could be back in lockdown by Christmas. Now, many EU governments are panicking as infection rates soar — and protesters have taken to the streets to oppose new lockdowns and, in the case of Austria, compulsory vaccinations from next February. What is the situation in the worst-affected countries? Austria Current number of people recorded as infected: 144,442 —

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

How Britain and France learned to live with terror

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 the pandemic: Holland, Austria and Germany are re-imposing restrictions and Boris Johnson, who used the ‘learn to live with it’ line in July, has refused to rule out a Christmas lockdown. Yet while Europe’s presidents and prime ministers appear ready to go to any length to protect their people from this virus, their approach to another

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

My moment of madness in the opticians

Foolishly I chose new specs in the village optician’s after a long lunch: a rather outré design that I might not have chosen had I been completely sober. For the past decade I’ve worn a retro design I’d first admired in David Bailey’s striking black and white photographs of Ron Kray. Thinking it might be time for a change of style to reflect my invalid passivity, and the hairless dome of my surprisingly small skull, I’d gone in a moment of madness for a pair of John Lennon’s hippie silver circles. Three weeks later, I returned to the shop to try them on with the new prescription lenses fitted. It

Wednesday

Jonathan Miller

Why has London’s Royal Institution cancelled Eric Zemmour?

On Friday night, the insurgent but still undeclared French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour was to address 600 of his supporters, the merely curious, and the media, in a ‘rendezvous’ at the Royal Institution in Mayfair. No prizes for guessing that the RI, a quintessential institution of the enlightenment prizing reason and inquiry above all, has now terminated the booking after performing ‘due diligence’ and discovering that the rightist Zemmour is not their sort. A spokesman for the RI declined to explain the reason why the London Friends of Zemmour were suddenly considered unsuitable to rent its magnificent theatre on Albemarle Street. Or why Zemmour himself might be unsuitable to speak

Saturday

Gavin Mortimer

France is using migrants just like Belarus

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’. That’s true, of course, but to hear such words from France. Quelle hypocrisie! There are far fewer migrants camping out in cardboard cities in Paris this year. Why? Because these camps have been broken up and the migrants – overwhelmingly young men from Africa and the Middle East – have headed north to Calais. Once

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

A troubling tide of anti-Semitism is sweeping Britain and France

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. The elderly woman, a Holocaust survivor, had known Mihoub since he was a boy, but he still snuffed out her life because she was a Jew. An accomplice claimed Mihoub screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he stabbed Knoll. It was a murder almost identical in nature to that of Sarah Halimi, slain in the same arrondissement of

John Keiger John Keiger

The remarkable rise of French sovereignism

The French presidential campaign reveals French voters’ widespread urge to roll back EU powers. The top five candidates for the April 2022 elections (Emmanuel Macron excluded) have French national sovereignty, ‘taking back control’ and a concomitant reduction in EU powers as main planks of their manifestos. What the French refer to as ‘sovereignist’ policies clearly meet the expectations of French voters as opposed to the globalism and ever-more-Europe favoured by Emmanuel Macron. But it is the means of taking back control proposed by the five presidential candidates that is explosive. All opinion polls regularly show these ‘sovereignist’ candidates garnering some 65 per cent of French support. The Harris Interactive poll

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

It’s time for Boris to turn back the Channel migrant boats

There is a sentence in the latest BBC report on English Channel migrant crossings that is just exquisite. Thursday saw 1,000 people arrive in Britain unauthorised — a new record — and the story on the Corporation’s website explains how UK Border Force boats, as well as lifeboats, ferried the arrivals to Dover. However, it added: ‘A Whitehall source accused France of losing control of the situation.’ It’s a line worthy of Swift. Britain is seeing record levels of illegal migration, the Home Office is running a maritime Uber service, and somehow it’s all the French’s fault. Some wonder why the Boris Johnson era hasn’t produced any great political satire

Friday

Jonathan Miller

Is Eric Zemmour running or not?

Eric Zemmour, the right-wing journalist and self-declared populist, is at a crossroads. Will he or won’t he declare himself a presidential candidate? Few doubt he will declare. Timing is an issue. Some in his camp think he should delay declaring as long as possible. But executing an effective launch will be more important than its timing. He’s under concerted attack by political and media allies of President Emmanuel Macron. Yet his ability to rapidly respond, to perform opposition research of his own, to build a ground campaign, remains constrained. Is he really ready to mount a presidential election campaign, which will be considerably more demanding, costly and tricky than his

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Fishing for votes: what’s really behind our trade war with France?

A decade ago, French-bashing was all the rage. David Cameron famously declared Britain would ‘roll out the red carpet’ for those fleeing the steep tax hikes proposed by the newly elected Socialist president François Hollande. The French economy continued to be a source of derision for the British, culminating in the managing director of John Lewis describing it as ‘sclerotic, hopeless and downbeat’ in October 2014. The following month, Hollande despatched his 37-year-old English-speaking economy minister to London with instructions to prove to the British that the French economy was in good health. That minister was Emmanuel Macron. ‘Whether we like it or not, the Anglo-Saxon press are the opinion-formers

Dot Wordsworth

The real ‘scallop’ war: how do you pronounce it?

‘You say scallops and I say scallops,’ sang my husband in his best Ginger Rogers accents. Since we both pronounce the bivalve to rhyme with dollop, there was a certain lack of contrast. There has been a scallop war with France in past days. Though both French and English enjoy them on the plate, it is the French in the 15th century who provided us with the name, escalope. We just knocked the beginning off the word. Our cockle too, from at least a century earlier, is from the French word that gives them coquilles St Jacques. (Mussel is from Latin musculus, ‘muscle’, which also gave the word mus, ‘mouse’,

Bruce Anderson

Is it worth gambling on supermarket wine bargains?

Rich men often look out for bargains. I suppose that is why they are rich. But there can be problems. Occasionally bargains fail to live up to their name. It would not be easy to find a single bottle of le Montrachet for £600, yet a friend of mine once bought a whole case for that sum. He forgot the wise old adage: ‘If something sounds too good to be true, it is probably neither.’ Not one of his 12 bottles turned out to be drinkable. On a lesser scale, my friend Geoffrey fell victim to Waitrose. He and Louise invited me to lunch and the pièce de résistance was

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Why I didn’t get a hug at COP26

COP26 is not your typical power summit, because world leaders, NGOs and hacks are all in the same scrum. Outside their gilded fortresses politicians reveal different habits. John Kerry has the most purposeful stride, eyes rigid to the front, refusing to acknowledge the melee. Macron gives an impromptu press conference at the drop of a hat: he always has an articulate opinion to share, though his macho minders manhandle anyone who gets a little too close. Trudeau is predictably generous with his flirtatious smile. And Modi is the most huggy, which I hadn’t anticipated. He hugs everyone. Except me. I was particularly struck by his warm embrace of Luxembourg’s PM,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Fishing friction, Greta’s singalong and terror in Tokyo

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told delegates to the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26) in Glasgow: ‘It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock and we need to act now.’ He left the conference the next day. British companies would have to publish plans on reaching net zero by 2050. India said it would reach net zero by 2070. Greta Thunberg, aged 18, stood in Govan Festival Park leading a chorus of ‘You can shove your climate crisis up your arse’ to the tune of ‘Ye cannae shove yer grannie aff a bus’. ‘None of us will live

Wednesday

Jonathan Miller

Did Macron win the Brexit fish war?

Who is winning the fish war? Will gentlemen in England still a-bed think themselves accursed they were not there? This morning, the war looked rather, forgive me, fishy. France has suspended until Thursday its threats to disrupt the Channel Tunnel. Boris declared he would make no concessions. His bellicose promise came immediately after the UK and Channel Islands handed the French 100 more fishing permits. Maybe it will hot up. Maybe not. French-bashing is flourishing at least. Jacob Rees-Mogg has pronounced the French to be always grumpy in October, the anniversary of Agincourt and Trafalgar. And he’s being predictably reflected in Brit-bashing from Paris, dragging out the Marquis de Ximenès’s

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France must ensure the safety of Eric Zemmour

There are several similarities between Eric Zemmour and the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, and one distinct difference. The Dutchman was homosexual and an ardent campaigner for gay rights, whereas the Frenchman, who has three children, recently reaffirmed his opposition to gay marriage. But on Islam and immigration they had much in common. Fortuyn, for example, campaigned for a reduction in the overall annual number of immigrants to Holland from 40,000 to 10,000, with not one Muslim among that figure. Zemmour wants an end to all immigration and believes that Islam ‘is not compatible with France’. Fortuyn paid with his life for his views. He was assassinated on May 6, 2002,

Monday

Katy Balls

Is Britain heading for a full-blown fish war with France?

As the COP26 summit gets underway, a diplomatic Brexit row is escalating on the sidelines of the conference over fish. After France threatened to block British boats from its ports and increase checks on vessels over a disagreement on fishing licences, the UK warned it could retaliate if France goes through with it. Suggestions from the French over the weekend that a solution in the form of ‘practical operational measures’ had been found were quickly shot down by the UK side. With a French election looming, Macron can be expected to do more not less of this This morning, Liz Truss doubled down – using a morning media round to say the UK is

John Keiger John Keiger

Macron is following in the failed footsteps of the wrong Napoleon

Is Emmanuel Macron turning into Emperor Napoleon III? Not the great Napoleon who conquered Europe and was eventually defeated by a British-led coalition at Waterloo and exiled to Saint Helena in the south Atlantic. But his lesser nephew, whose obsession with his uncle’s glory drove him to flatulent demagoguery at home, grandiose schemes abroad and humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870.  Under the last monarch of France, the country descended into the revolutionary Commune, was amputated of Alsace-Lorraine and prostrated before a united and all-powerful Germany. The lesser Napoleon was eventually deposed, vilified and outlawed to Chislehurst, outside London. It was to Napoleon III that Karl Marx