Jonathan Miller, who lives near Montpellier, is the author of Shock of the News: Confessions of a Troublemaker, Gibson Square. He is on X @lefoudubaron.
President Emmanuel Macron may or may not have imagined that his mission to Moscow would head off armed conflict in Ukraine. He will nevertheless have calculated that while his mission was an abject diplomatic failure, it was a modest political success. The French pro-Macron media (most of it) bigged up the visit as a triumph
In February 1995, Jacques Chirac was at 12 per cent in the polls. Two months later he was president. Two months is precisely the time remaining before the first round of voting in the 2022 presidential election. At the moment, President Macron’s advantage looks unassailable: the Economist’s tracker puts his chances of being re-elected at
There are just 59 days to go until voters turn out for the first round of the French presidential election and it is not even clear who will make the starting gate. For now, all the pundits and the bookies are predicting the re-election of President Emmanuel Macron. But the real story is about how French
This year’s French election campaign is a strangely muted affair. The incumbent, president Emmanuel Macron, has still neglected to declare that he is a candidate, even as he directs the entire weight of the French state towards his re-election. The geometry is highly variable. Pollsters admit privately that they’re struggling to measure abstentionism, or how
Is Marion Maréchal, granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and niece of Marine, about to emerge from political retirement to support the presidential election campaign of Éric Zemmour? Normally the answer to any question posed by a journalist is ‘no’ but maybe not this time. Marion could give new momentum to Zemmour’s campaign, which seems recently
Montpellier Emmanuel Macron, with eagle eyes, is staring at Europe like stout Cortez. Elected president of France almost five years ago aged just 39, he dreams beyond the renewal of his lease on the Élysée Palace in the April election. Now Angela Merkel has left the world stage, Macron’s ambition is to replace her as
President Emmanuel Macron’s declaration that he intends to ‘emmerder’ – which loosely translates, excuse my English, as ‘piss off’ – the non-vaccinated has been widely reported this morning as the mother of all political gaffes. Macron declared, in an interview with Le Parisien, France’s best-selling newspaper: In a democracy, the worst enemy is lies and
We’re closing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles in 2021. Here’s number two: Jonathan Miller writing in April about the woes of owning a battery-powered vehicle. I bought an electric car and wish I hadn’t. It seemed a good idea at the time, albeit a costly way of proclaiming my environmental virtuousness.
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Welcome to the special Christmas episode of The Edition! In this episode, we look at five major topics that dominated the news this year and the pages of The Spectator. First up a review of the year in politics with our resident Coffee House Shots’ team James Forsyth, Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman. We discuss
It seems like just minutes ago that Michel Barnier, former Brexit negotiator, centre-right Républicain exiled to Brussels two decades ago, was being widely touted (not least by British correspondents in Paris) as the respectable opposition to President Emmanuel Macron in the 2022 presidential election campaign. As I predicted here and here, he’s subsequently disappeared in
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In this week’s episode: Is there any substance to the government’s new drugs agenda? In The Spectator this week Fraser Nelson writes the cover story on the government’s new 10 years drugs plan and finds that while on the surface this seems like a new war on drugs, it might actually have some thoughtful and
Of all the global trends exacerbated by Covid, the demise of the necktie is probably not the most important. It is, however, worth noting — because the way we dress tells us a lot about who we are. The tie has been on the retreat as a quintessential item of the male wardrobe for the
French president Emmanuel Macron is reported in this week’s Canard Enchaîné – the French equivalent to Private Eye – to have called Boris Johnson a ‘gougnafier’. Gougnafier is an intriguing term with many linguistic roots. It is a nightmarish word to translate. Can you find one word in English to convey someone both rude and
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The migrants that tragically lost their lives in the English Channel has caused Anglo- French relations to further deteriorate. There is a theory however, that it suits Macron’s agenda to be in a perpetual war with the Brits. Could this be the case when migrants are still in the hands of the traffickers? ‘These people-smuggling
Boris Johnson yesterday wrote to French president Emmanuel Macron suggesting escalated measures to stop the deadly human traffic between Calais and Kent. As voters in both France and Britain asked themselves how this terrible tragedy could have happened, the letter might be read as a nudge to the French, who have not merely been turning a
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
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
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
Once upon a time, the insolence demonstrated by Emmanuel Macron in his fish war with the United Kingdom would have been met with a firmer response than inviting the French ambassador to the Foreign Office for a chat. Bombarding the ramparts of Saint-Malo hardly seems on the menu today, however – even were our navy
During the now virtually forgotten cod wars between Iceland and the United Kingdom from 1958 to 1976, the diminutive foreign office official Sir Donald Maitland invited to King Charles Street for a dressing down the Icelandic Ambassador, a 6’7” Nordic giant. When the ambassador arrived, Sir Donald climbed on to his massive desk, drew himself up
