The far-right National Rally, led by former firebrand, now grande dame, Marine Le Pen, did not win the second round of the parliamentary elections. It came third. The governing party of President Emmanuel Macron was not obliterated. It came a respectable second, just 28 seats behind the winners, the New Popular Front, headed by the septuagenarian Marxist Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

What happens now is anybody’s guess. Some form of cohabitation between the President’s faction (En Marche, Renaissance, Ensemble – ­ take your pick) and selected bits of the Left, along with the rump of the centre-right Republicans, may be cobbled together. And the resulting lash-up could stagger on for another 12 months until Macron is constitutionally permitted to call fresh elections.

Either that or the President will resign, forcing Le Pen, Mélenchon and whoever manages to seize hold of the centre to battle to the last in an out-of-sequence presidential contest.

That or something else entirely.

Here is what was supposed to happen.

After its stellar performance in last Sunday’s first round of the elections, the National Rally would storm home in first place, perhaps even achieving an overall majority of seats. No one doubted this. Twenty-eight-year-old Jordan Bardella, as Le Pen’s personally annointed dauphin, would be installed as prime minister, bent on giving everybody everything while ridding France of millions of unwanted immigrants.

Chaos, of course, would follow.

Mélenchon – so far left he could have given Trotsky a run for his roubles – would immediately unleash the dogs of war, calling on “the people” to take to the streets in pursuit of a second Revolution lacking only the guillotine.

Macron, meanwhile, having misread the national mood as if it had been written in Esperanto, would retire to lick his wounds in the gilded confines of the Élysée Palace, his future for the remainder of his term in office reduced to shaking hands with world leaders and presiding over banquets amid the baroque splendor of Versailles.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, with all parties to the left of Attila the Hun united in defiance of a far-right coup, the immediate crisis was averted. No one won. Everybody lost, so that the increasingly bloated corpse of French governance moved on to its next stage of decomposition. Mélenchon, inevitably, proclaimed himself the victor and at once demanded that he be appointed prime minister. Le Pen, as ever, shifted the goalposts, letting it be known that the tide that would sweep her to power had not yet reached its height but would do so imminently. And Macron, as Jupiter in retrograde, looked on, rubbing his hands, wondering how best to exploit what had happened.

What sense can be made of all this? France, like Britain, is a great country. It cannot go on like this. Just for starters, the Paris Olympics are less than two weeks away. What happens if the Games are marred by violence on the streets of the capital? What is the world supposed to think? Then there is this week’s Nato summit. Over the last six months, Macron has several times repeated that French troops might, in extremis, have to be sent east to bolster the efforts of President Volodomyr Zelenski in resisting the Russian invasion of his country. But both Le Pen and Mélenchon oppose any such direct involvement and, in fact, as old friends of Vladimir Putin, are much more inclined to support peace talks that would most likely leave Russia in possession of one third of Ukrainian territory.

More generally, there are domestic issues to be resolved, most of them to do with the economy. Le Pen and Mélenchon, as populists, want to boost state spending and raise taxes on the rich. They also want to bring the age of retirement down again from 64 to 62, or even, in Mélenchon’s case, to 60. While no longer set on leaving the EU or abandoning the single currency, both want to distance themselves from Brussels – the very opposite of what Macron considers essential for the preservation of peace, prosperity and Europe’s role in the world. Squaring the various interconnected circles is a logical impossibility.

What then? The pundits (shamelessly consigning their previous losing bets to history) are already talking of an end to the Fifth Republic, established by De Gaulle in the wake of post-war divisions and uncertainties. This could happen, but it would be an immensely complicated procedure, hard fought on all sides and requiring the approval of the electorate by way of a referendum. Macron could, in theory, make a Sixth Republic his lasting legacy. Who, though, would put money on such an outcome?

More likely, he will soldier on, with a prime minister and cabinet committed to very little but keeping the show on the road, offering nods to the left and right but nothing that would frighten the horses. One year on, on July 8, 2025, he would in this circumstance call a further round of elections to the National Assembly, hoping that the mercurial French people would for once make up their minds and give real authority to a new  centrist-dominated administration.

That seems to me the most sensible option, though his presidency over the interim period would be an obvious hostage to fortune. As to who is to blame for the unfortunate series of events that have marked his time as President, I attribute it to four factors: Macron’s arrogance (who does he think he is?); the pandemic (over which he, like other world leaders, had only limited control); the resulting stagnation of the economy (made worse by the energy crisis and inflation brought on by the war in Ukraine); and, last but not least, the impact of mass-migration.

But, as a bonus factor, at least as important as the rest, I would throw in the voters. France’s talking heads, ever more numerous and omnipresent on television, radio and social media, love to repeat that no matter the verdict, the people have spoken. It is as if those who cast their votes are attempting to give the politicians a message when, in fact, they are split at least three ways, pitted against each other as surely as armies at war. If you claim that you can read the runes in France, you do so with a cobblestone in one hand and a banner in the other.

Fantasy politics are the norm in France, just as they have been since 1789 when the tumbrils first rolled for the enemies of the people. Everybody, from far-left to extreme right, wants peace and prosperity, with high wages, increased benefits, a perfectly functioning health system, affordable homes and retirement at 60. They expect a generous state pension and a working week that does not extend beyond 35 hours. Many – perhaps most – want an end to mass-immigration and a clear definition of what it means to be French. Other than that, they want to be left alone to lead their own lives, filling their shopping trolleys to bursting point at weekends, driving as fast as they like in diesel cars and spending the whole of August on holiday.

If they don’t get what they want, they are ready to take to the streets. If they only get part of what they want, they are ready to take to the streets. It is in the knowledge that this is the only constant that I confidently predict troubles ahead for France over the next three years.  But, like the media’s talking heads, I could be wrong.

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I greeted the emergence of Emmanuel Macron, back in 2016, as a chance for France to to wake up to the realities of the world in the twenty-first century. De Gaulle and Mitterrand were long gone, taking their old certainties with them. Their more recent successors, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, had shown themselves to be men of straw, unequal to the challenges of a new age, and it was time for a third political giant to take the stage, embodying the changing times into which we had all stumbled.

France in 2017 was crying out for reform. The humiliation of the Nazi occupation and the resulting tensions between collabos and résistants were history. Just as important – perhaps more so – following last-gasp blood-lettings and amid bitter recrimination on all sides, the Empire was declared a closed book. Those who in 1968 had tried, and failed, to rally the nation behind a revolutionary revival were dead or in their dotage. But troubling new issues had arisen that could no longer be ignored. The years of plenty, known as the trentes glorieuses, during which, from 1950 to 1980, France was reborn as a forward-looking industrial power, had given way in the new century to a combination of economic complacency, benefits dependency and ever-mounting anxiety over the related questions of mass-immigration and militant Islam.

As in Britain and America, two political families had for years shared out the nation’s governance, aided by a self-regarding class of hautes-fonctionnaires. The Gaullists, under a variety of names, represented the centre-right, the Socialists the centre left. The former kept the far-right at bay while the latter constrained the ambitions of the more extreme left.

Did the trick work? It used to. There had been no equivalent in France of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. Occasionally, the sans papiers and the sans culottes rose up in protest, to be beaten back by the police and gendarmerie. But, in general, the country appeared to be out of puff, content to drift slowly downhill. If there was ever an overwhelming question, the response was, oh, do not ask.

But then, in the summer of 2017, enter Macron, the 39-year-old banker from Amiens, arriving fully formed, as if he were Jupiter, rather than Venus, on France’s shore to herald a new renaissance. Campaigning on a platform that was “neither right nor left” but held out a vision of government based on reason and practicality, it was supposed to banish the likes of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen and the marxist Jean-Luc Mélenchon to the political margins.

Voters were transfixed. It was as if Descartes and Voltaire had joined the fray. Suddenly, Sarkozy looked like a second-hand car dealer. Hollande, the incumbent, seemed to have no idea what was happening and no answer to the rhetoric. Macron became President as much by acclamation as election, and his movement, En Marche, designed, it was said, on the back of an envelope during a train journey from Paris to Bordeaux, swept all before it, winning, with its allies, 350 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly.

I will not rehearse here the many failings, and occasional triumphs, of Macronisme in the seven years since. You may, however, recall the uprising of the gilets-jaunes; the conflict with the railway workers and the trade unions; the hard-fought battle to raise the state retirement age from 62 to 64; the attempt – largely successful – to ratchet up the economy; the grim, if principled, response to recurring Islamist atrocities; the struggle to confine and defeat Covid; and the hapless, sometimes comical, attempt to rein in Vladimir Putin on the eve of the Russian’s invasion of Ukraine.

The common factor in all of the above was Macron’s characteristic mix of extreme arrogance (his “Jupiter” complex) and stubborn defence of what he believed to be the only right, and rational, solutions to deep-seated problems. Historians are sure to play up the self-esteem. His only modern rival in this area, if De Gaulle and Mitterrand are to be excluded, was Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing, who ruled from the Élysée Palace in the 1970s as if he were more of a Bourbon than the Old Pretender himself, the Duc d’Orléans.

But those looking back will also surely acknowledge that his reforms, and attempted reforms, were necessary if France was to hold on to its place as a key member of the G7, G20, and Nato, as well as the principal motive force of the European Union. They will not, perhaps, award him top marks for achievement, but are bound to note that he tried harder than any of his rivals, Marine Le Pen excepted, to point France in a new direction. And if nothing else, he was by some distance the smartest French leader of his generation.

His tragedy – if that isn’t too strong a word – is that, having pulled down the temple that housed the centre-right and centre-left, he left no lasting structure in place. Instead of an empowered centre, France was left with a hard-right and a far-left, kept apart by little more than shifting sand.  

Looking forward, not back, it is hard to see how Macron can emerge with credit from the parliamentary elections he called this month after losing to Le Pen and the far-left in the European elections. His decision to call an election was rash and it is likely he now regrets it, which, if true, puts him in the same leaky boat as Britain’s Rishi Sunak.

If Le Pen’s National Rally wins enough seats to ensure that she, not the President, decides who will be prime minister (almost certainly the 28-year-old Jordan Bardella), the resulting cohabitation will be combative and bloody. Macron will stand on his dignity and will do his utmost to temp down any outright assaults on the constitution, mainly in the area of immigration and who is and who isn’t French. But he will be in holding pattern for the remaining two-and-a-half years of his presidency, restricted to strutting the world stage, unable to fulfill what he surely regarded as his destiny.

On the other hand, he could, against the odds, pull off an astonishing coup de théâtre, winning just enough seats to enable him to form a coalition government made up of En Marche (now Renaissance), the bulk of the centre-right Republicans and several smaller allies, including his erstwhile prime minister Édouard Philippe.

As encounters go, it would not be Austerlitz, more Verdun, but none the less memorable for that. Houdini would be impressed.

But I’m joking, of course. We are heading into fantasy territory here. The reality – much more likely – is that Madame Le Pen will win by a stoppage in round two of the contest on 7 July, initiating a new period of exteme instabilty in France that could yield her the presidency in 2027 and put the final seal on a new right-facing European Union.

This would not be the legacy Emannuel Macron imagined for himself when he decided to abandon banking for politics . But at least it would have his name on it, which for a man of his supreme, ironclad ego is never to be sneezed at.

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The most likely result of the President’s bombshell announcement, made last night in the course of an impromptu television address, is that Marine Le Pen, or more likely her surrogate Jordan Bardella, will be installed next month as his new prime minister at the head of a hard-right, anti-immigrant administration.

There have been periods of cohabitation – President and government from two different factions – before. But never like this.

Macron will be hoping against hope that French voters will draw back from the brink. On Sunday, his centre-left, centre-right Renaissance Party came a distant second to Le Pen’s National Rally in the elections to the European Parliament and there is little doubt that his enduring would-be nemesis is already picking her nominees for the top ministerial positions. But if – as they have done before – the French recoil somewhat from a leap into the dark, the President could yet hold on to the levers of power.

That, at least, is what he will be telling himself.

But what a momentous week for the Right. First, Nigel Farage vowing to make his Reform party the main opposition party after the UK elections on 4 July. Now Macron, risking everything in an all-or-nothing challenge to the people of France. Are high-stakes gambles now to become the norm in Europe? Will Olaf Scholz, the embattled chancellor of Germany, be the next to put everything on the line, or will it be Spain’s Pedro Sánchez? Suddenly, Italy, led by Giorgia Meloni, looks to be the most stable of the EU’s member states – and who would have imagined that just twelve months ago?

The basis for what passes for Macron’s optimism – enunciated between gritted teeth – is that the European elections are one thing and France another. The Euros, he has to reckon, are a chance to let off steam, while the National Assembly is where the business of government is actually done.

Well, up to a point. Ever since the President failed to retain his majority in the National Assembly after the elections in the summer of 2022, very little of note has been achieved. It is as if democracy itself has been put on hold, reduced to ensuring that France doesn’t actually fall apart at the seams. Macron himself has recently done little more than grandstand at state occasions, acting presidential while in reality having less and less to do.

He has suggested that French troops might one day take to the field in Ukraine and called, loftily, on Europe to get its act together not only on the threat posed by Russia but on relations with China. He has even let it be known that he is ready to join Spain, Norway and Ireland in recognising Palestine as a sovereign state. Last week, having returned from a state visit to Berlin, he posed with world leaders, including King Charles, on the beaches of Normandy, then welcomed President Biden to the Élysee Palace to rest his weary bones. Following the parliamentary elections, he will preside over the Paris Olympics, anxious that they should not be overshadowed by the threat of terrorism. In the autumn, refreshed after a spell of R&R at his Mediterranean retreat in the Fort de Brégançon, he will join church leaders in the grand re-opening of Notre Dame – an achievement that might turn out to be his only lasting legacy.

Throughout, in keeping with his inflated estimation of his own worth, Macron will be focused on preserving his authority. Everyone else will be concerned much more with what Le Pen, with the 28-year-old Bardella by her side, will do if catapulted into power.

In the UK, Farage can talk until he is blue (rather than red) in the face about what he would do to solve the immigration crisis. He knows that he will not be able to do more than hurl abuse at Keir Starmer and what will almost certainly be the new Labour government. But in France, Le Pen and Bardella will have to show that they are not all mouth and no pantalons. Like Giorgia Meloni, they will have to operate within the system and under the gaze of their European allies. The pair will be hoping that with the Right rampaging across the Continent (though not yet in full control, even in the Netherlands and Austria), they will have a green light to do as they please. But they will also be conscious that Macron, still with three years to run as President, can step in to frustrate them, using his bully pulpit (the throne at Versailles) alongside his presidential veto to make their life endlessly difficult.

“The rise of nationalists and demagogues is a danger for our nation and for Europe,” he told the nation on Sunday night. “After this day, I cannot go on as though nothing has happened.”

Who knows? It could be that Macron has guessed right and that the French middle ground will move in his direction on 30 June 30 and 8 July. He will be hoping that keeping the slow-burn economic recovery on course will trump the potential chaos that Le Pen & Co could bring. In that event, it may yet be the case that he will be able to cobble together a governing coalition made up of Renaissance, the centre-right Republicans and a splattering of other factions up to and including the Socialists.

Just don’t bet on it.

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True, there was some residual resentment over the many acts of terror perpetrated by the underground Irgun movement during the preceding British mandate, including the attack on the headquarters of the British mission in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people died. But as the plucky Jewish irregulars first held out against the Arab armies and then defeated them, the sense was that history was at last moving in such a way as to prevent a second Holocaust, and thank God for it. 

Nineteen years later, emotions in the UK were equally stirred when, during the Six Day War launched against Israel by Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the intended victims ended the fighting as victors, occupying not only East Jerusalem but the whole of the West Bank and Gaza (Trans-Jordan/Palestine), the Golan Heights (Syrian) and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. It was incredible. Israel was now a hero nation – proof that David really could slay Goliath. 

This pattern was repeated in 1973, when the Yom Kippur war, that at first looked deeply threatening to Israel, ended once more in a triumph for Jewish arms.   

It was after 1967 that much changed. The whole of Palestine fell under occupation. Its people, with the help of their Arab neighbours, had been fighting not, for the most part, to drive the Jews into the sea (though some certainly felt that way), but to recover lands lost to them in more than twenty years of conflict. 

It ought not be forgotten that all of what we call Israel today, including the attenuated statelet achieved in 1948 was formerly Arab land and had been for the best part of two-thousand years. The native Jewish population was small and scattered, most of their brethren – the Diaspora – having been separated from the homeland since the defeat by Rome of Jewish armies in a series of hard-fought battles between 66 and 135 AD. 

It was, first, the promotion of Zionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then, crucially, the impact of the Holocaust that, over time, persuaded close to half of the world’s deeply traumatised Jews to return home (to make Aliyah) and to reclaim their lost inheritance. 

If you were a Jew, both the logic and the necessity was reinforced by scripture. They believed themselves to be God’s chosen people. But if you were a Palestinian, the issue, in a very short space of time, was that you were being evicted from your fields and homes to make room for settlers, most of them European, backed by Western sentiment and American money. 

There was little opportunity for an accommodation to be reached. The Jews just kept on coming and the more they came, the more the Arab peasantry was shoved aside or reduced to servitude. The Palestinian cause was not helped by the narrow-mindedness and corruption of the Al-Fatah leadership, but the truth is that land for peace was a lie. Settlement was the reality. 

Gaza was always a particular case. Controlled by Egypt from 1948 to 1967, it was occupied and partially settled by Israel until a negotiated withdrawal in 2006. Densely populated and with a strong sense of itself, it quickly fell under the sway of Hamas, a violent Islamist grouping motivated to the exclusion of all else by its visceral hatred of the “Zionist entity”. 

Having narrowly won the only election it ever fought, Hamas set about transforming Gaza, with its 2.4 million people crammed into a space smaller than the Isle of Wight, into an Islamist dictatorship. From time to time, having allied itself with revolutionary Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, it would launch assaults on Israeli territory or send ageing Katyusha rockets in the general direction of Jewish settlements. 

Israel’s response, with the cooperation of Egypt, was to blockade the enclave by land and sea, so that imports of every kind were heavily restricted, no one could enter or leave without permission and fishing boats were obliged to keep within sight of land and the Israeli navy. Gaza survived, but it suffered. Enclosed within a wall of steel, its inhabitants grew increasingly bitter. 

Last weekend’s assault by militants bent on murder and mayhem was not the first of its kind, but it was easily, in every sense, the most far-reaching. Rockets rained down on Israel. Young people attending a “rave” in the desert were shot to pieces. More than a hundred hostages were taken, some of them later paraded through the streets to be spat on by onlookers. 

What grand strategy, if any, lies behind it can only be wondered at. All that is certain is that the targets were all and any Jews that could be found, women and children included. It was like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in reverse. More than one thousand Israelis died. 

Now we await the full measure of Israeli retaliation. Air force jets have already reduced much of Gaza City to rubble. There is no electricity, not even for hospitals. All outside, supplies of food and water have been cut off. And the Israeli Army, now 300,000-strong, with more reservists joining every day, is poised to engage in a wholesale land assault. Benjamin Netanyahu, mired in corruption, has vowed that the gates of Hell are about to open for Hamas. The ordinary people of Gaza must get out, he says, by way of Egypt, because Gaza, as we have known it, like Carthage of old, is about to cease to exist. 

It is easy to pick sides in this unfolding tragedy. The two are deeply entwined in each other’s guilt and misery. If you ask me what the way out is, I cannot tell you. I have no idea. But if anyone tries to persuade you that, after a great wrong, justice is about to be done on the planes of Gaza, I would beg you to think again.  

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Blundy – always “Blundy” – was shot dead in 1989 during the civil war in El Salvador by a sniper who almost certainly had no idea who he was. Tony – always “Tone” to Blundy – lived on for a further 34 years, winning an enviable reputation as a biographer and poker player before suffering a stroke, aged 70, that left him semi-paralysed for the last six years of his life. 

As you reach old age (I turned 75 in September), you find, inevitably, that the ranks of your old friends is thinning out. I have lost three more in the last six months alone. You mourn the dear departed (while noting smugly that in some way you are now more special than ever), but you also feel yourself shuffling towards the finish line. 

Blundy was not my first casualty. That distinction goes to Ronnie Bunting, my best friend and chief tormentor at school, who was murdered in 1980 while head of the Irish National Liberation Army. But Blundy’s death hit me harder. He was what in Ireland is known as a terrible “messer”. Tall and rangy, with a dress sense that owed everything to Clint Eastwood as both Dirty Harry and The Man with No Name, he lived life entirely according to his own rules. Evans once demanded to know why he wasn’t wearing the suit he had asked him to buy, on expenses, to be worn while working in the office. The reply was classic: “I am wearing it, Harry.” 

In 1972, I shared a rented ground-floor flat in south Belfast. One morning, while I was having a bath, he climbed in through the bathroom window and stood there, knee-deep in my soapy water, wondering if I fancied lunch. On holiday in Tunisia in 1973, he insisted that we run at full speed each morning down a dingy hotel corridor towards the breakfast room, guarded by an invisible glass door that was either open or shut. If we’d smashed into the door, it could have ended horribly, but we never did. What were the odds? 

Tone would have known. He took me once to a crimson casino in London’s West End, where he liked to play big boys’ poker. I have no interest in games, or gambling, and spent most of my time at the bar counter, where they served fast food. But Tony was obviously a natural, as readers of Big Deal, his bestselling account of a year as a professional poker player, will recall. As he built up his chips, I looked on, eating mine. I was bored and fascinated at the same time. 

Decades later, when we were both working in New York, he lived in a luxury apartment in mid-town Manhattan that overlooked (or so it seemed) the Empire State Building. He had just been installed as the inaugural Fellow of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, but, to add insult to my injury, was also paid a bundle as editor-at large on Tina Brown’s short-lived Talk magazine. 

Full of beans, he was inordinately proud of his lofty address, from the balcony of which, while dispensing champagne, he regaled me with tales of his fabulous friends, one of whom at the time, was apparently Placido Domingo. The acclaimed tenor (since revealed as a sexual predator) had, I was assured, asked him to collaborate with him in writing an opera, which did not surprise me. If he had said that Lucien Freud had asked him to sit, naked, for his portrait, that wouldn’t have surprised me either. 

Tony – always Tony to me – was an indefatigable name-dropper. He peppered even the most inconsequential conversations with references to celebs he knew, literary, political and social. The odd thing was that, while he obviously hoped to impress, he was at the same time tickled pink by the range and depth of his Rolodex. He was, after all, a Lancashire lad, empowered by his three years at Oxford, during which, while translating Greek drama, he edited Isis and was the first to publish the rapscallionally Chris Hitchens. 

Just months ago, having belatedly read his autobiography, Based on a True Story, I tried to get back in contact, but failed. He’d probably changed his email address and took no interest in his lingering Facebook presence. But I suspect he also felt diminished by his stroke and wouldn’t have wished me to see him in his reduced circumstance. 

It was “Tone” who put together The Last Paragraph, a collection of Blundy’s journalism published a year or two after his death. A number of the pieces he chose were very funny, especially if they were about Ronald Reagan and his circle, written from Washington. Others, while sharply observed, have not aged well. The various small wars and insurrections that took up so much of his time in the eighties hold little resonance today, and Tony confided in me that he was surprised by how little of his close friend’s output had stood the test of time. 

But such is journalism, and such is life. Very few of us stand the test of time. 

My memories of Blundy center entirely on his outsize personality. If it is possible to be literally larger than life, that was him. I enter in evidence an image of him in his room in Belfast’s Europa Hotel working on a story featuring his encounter earlier that evening with a notorious Provisional IRA killer. As he typed, drinking from a copiously supplied glass of whiskey, there came a violent knock on the door. A woman’s voice from the corridor begged “David” – always David to his myriad conquests – to let her in as she had assumed he would spend the night with her. But “David” was having none of it. “Go away!” he shouted, or words to that effect. “I’m working.” The noise off continued for several minutes before fading into muttered imprecations. 

The last time I spoke to Blunders – as I sometimes thought of him – was a week or so before he was shot. I hadn’t seen him for at least three years and was somewhat miffed when I came across him in the snug of the Groucho Club around midnight talking to our mutual friend Patrick Cockburn. I didn’t know he was home and felt slighted. But a week later, the phone rang. It was Blundy, back in Washington, full of apologies. He was about to leave for San Salvador, he told me, but looked forward to seeing me again soon. He spoke of his fears of growing old (he was 44) and asked me, with a note, I thought, of quiet desperation, about how one went about creating a pension pot. 

I heard his voice one last time, on his answer machine. I was in New Delhi covering the Indian general election for the Sunday Times and had just seen on CNN that he had been shot and was in a critical condition. On a mindless impulse, I called his number in Washington and listened as he told me, tinnily, that he was out of town on assignment but would get back to me when he got my message. I left no message and, needless to add, he didn’t call. 

And now Tony, or Tone – or Anthony Holden as his obituarists would have it (how he would have loved a knighthood!) – is gone as well. He and Blundy had very little in common other than talent, boundless energy and an unputdownable love of life. Their differences were as nothing compared to these. I miss them both. 

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Equally, the fact that the news from France this summer was dominated by often violent protests against the raising of the state retirement age and the shooting dead of a teenager of North African ethnicity by a white traffic cop does not mean that the Communards are once more on the rampage or that the Guillotine is about to be reinstalled in the Place de la Revolution. 

The rejection by a majority of workers of measures adopted by President Macron to ensure the Government’s ability to meet future pension commitments, even if taken in tandem with the chronic frustration shown by those stuck in society’s margins, is no indication that October is once more Vendémiaire or that crazed Marxist Jean Luc Mélenchon is the new Robespierre. 

Nations have their ups and downs. The British people in recent years should appreciate that more than most. And in France, the signs are not only that the economy is rebooting but that all parties, not just those on the far right, are acutely aware of the need to address both mass immigration and injustice based on race and religious identity. 

Does this mean that there is no cause for alarm? No. There is always cause for alarm if you listen hard enough. The French Far-Right has never been as close to pole position in the race for the Élysée as it is now. Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally, has worked hard on her image and is looking increasingly plausible as Macron’s successor. Long characterised as a racist bigot, she is seen these days as more like the Veuve Clicquot, who, as the first woman in France to run an internationally recognised company, defied convention and revolutionised champagne production in the nineteenth century. 

Where voters once sensed danger, involving an overthrow of the system, now they see the possibility of meaningful change. 

Since the 2017 elections to the National Assembly, which saw her joined on its red benches by 87 other deputies from her party, Le Pen has been careful to rebrand herself as someone who follows the rules and can be relied on to do what’s right. There have been no hysterical outbursts. Rather, she has been at pains to engage with the system and to show that she is, in fact, Democracy’s Child. 

That said, Le Pen remains Le Pen. She promises lots of things, including a “fairer” state pension and massive improvements in the fields of healthcare and benefits. But most of all, she promises to control immigration and to oblige those of immigrant heritage already settled in France to conform to her view of what it means to be French. This resonates across whole swathes of the population, not just on the right. Those who come to France must, she says, do so legally and must agree to respect its culture and customs. Those who do not will be deported or repatriated – though how this would be done is far from clear. 

But can she do it? Can she win the presidency at the third time of asking, in 2027? Who knows. If she does, the example of Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy party, now her country’s prime minister, suggests that she would proceed softly, at least at first, working with others in Europe to clamp down on immigration and to reassert the primacy of national boundaries. It’s hard to be a radical in the EU, mired as it is in protocols and bureaucracy. Patience is required. But with the Far Right advancing in the opinion polls across the Continent while steadily building up their numbers in national parliaments, the testing time may not be that far off. 

Across the hemicycle from Le Pen in the Assembly, the Far Left is meanwhile so fragmented as to be politically incoherent. France Unbowed, a grouping led by the ageing street-fighter Mélenchon, has just 18 deputies, but the former teacher also leads, or seeks to corral, a further 57 deputies from the unfinished jig-saw that is the New Ecological and Social People’s Union (NUPES), which includes what remains of the once powerful French Socialist Party. Mélenchon is seriously old school. The way he sees it, controlling the means of production on behalf of the workers is the latest thing. The only surprise is that he does not actually proclaim the Proudhonist maxim that property is theft. 

The good news here is that NUPES is unravelling, with the more focused Greens and more moderate Socialists peeling away in search of advantage next time round. It is possible that the latter faction will stage something of a recovery in 2027, but the signs as yet are few and far between. Mélenchon, aged 72, is reported to be ready to lead the leftist charge, but is seen even by many of his own supporters as something of a busted flush.  

What could happen instead is that the centre-right Republicans, led since 2022 by its hardline president, Éric Ciotti, will regain some of its lost ground. As the current inheritors of the Gaullist mantle, Republicans were shaken in 2017 when they secured only 112 seats in the Assembly against the 308 achieved by Macron’s back-of-an-envelope centrists, La République En Marche. Worse followed in 2022, when Macron was returned for his second term as President. The party’s candidate, Valérie Pécresse, lost her deposit and its Assembly representation slumped to just 62. 

So far, so bad. But, as with nations, so with parties, and the smart money as things stand is on something of a standoff in the 2027 presidentials between Le Pen, Ciotti and whoever (interior minister Gérald Darmanin or finance minister Bruno Le Maire) is deployed to carry the post-Macron torch for En Marche. Macron himself will be gone, taking his top-down revision of the system with him, and there is a real chance that his party will follow him into the history books. A victory for Le Pen or Ciotti – now leaning closer to the Far right’s interrogation of France’s soul – would almost certainly be followed by a right-wing majority in the Assembly and a five-year governing coalition.  

Le Pen as President would send shockwaves across Europe. The rhetoric on all sides would be deafening. But for the daughter of Jean Marie Le Pen ­– an out-and-out extremist and long-time anti-semite – the challenges ahead would dwarf all the difficulties and frustrations she has endured over the last 30 years. Governing and campaigning are two different things. The French Deep State, represented by its haut fonctionnaires, top entrepreneurs, judges and the Constitutional Council, would place every obstacle in the way of policies that threatened the good name of France in the wider world. 

What they would do if the wider world – Germany, Italy, Poland and the US – pursued the same rightwards path is, of course, another question. 

For the moment, with Le Pen in her Veuve Clicquot phase, Emmanuel Macron is counting on something of an economic upswing to sustain his legacy and the future prospects of his Jupiterian approach to governance. Business and manufacturing are experiencing slow but steady growth, and two years from now it is possible that the Ukraine crisis – conceivably with his assistance – will no longer dominate the headlines. There will undoubtedly be protests over his law-and-order agenda, which, while seeking to reform the country’s often trigger-happy police, also grants law enforcement greater power to spy on the citizenry. But, for the moment, things are calming down. France is getting about its business. 

On the debit side, the President cannot be confident of meaningful change on the immigration front, which between now and 2027 could move votes more than anything else. He can only hope that France’s black and Muslim communities will buy into his gradually unfolding programme of legal reforms aimed at simultaneously persuading the white majority that their interests are being protected and that all are equal in the eyes of the state. 

No one, least of all Macron, is promising a return of the trentes glorieuses, which transformed France in the decades after the end of the Second World War. But this doesn’t mean there isn’t room for cautious optimism when considering the next five to ten years. The dramatis personae will change. That much is certain. The hope has to be that France’s underlying conservatism, laced as it is with just a soupçon of electoral explosive, will reimpose itself even if and when the names of those at the top look to be shocking. 

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Ossett, she says, is in crisis. It’s not just the shortage of good, well-paying jobs, or the lamentable state of the regional NHS, or the housing shortage, or inflation, or the condition of local schools – all of which weigh heavily on the local community. It is the fact that gangs of young people, some not yet into their teens, have gone feral, roaming the streets after school, intimidating women and the elderly while thieving anything they want from supermarkets and convenience stores. 

According to Gill, a primary school teacher in the town for more than 20 years, she and her husband daren’t visit town centre pubs or eat out once the light begins to fade. “If we want to call in on friends just a fifteen-minute walk away, we have to take a taxi. It wouldn’t be safe otherwise.” 

So what are the police doing about it? Nothing, she says. They have apparently advised older people to stay indoors in the evening and told staff in shops that are subject to shoplifting on an industrial scale to avoid confrontation with the youngsters responsible. 

If Gill is to be believed, you are more likely to encounter a 13-year-old boy with a knife in his hand than an officer on the beat. 

But was she exaggerating? First, I looked up Ossett in Wikipedia. Situated west of Wakefield, it is an ancient wool town, mentioned in the Domesday Book, that owed its prosperity during the Industrial Revolution to coal mining and textiles but which, since the 1980s, has been in genteel decline. No surprise there. Next, I consulted the official 2022 crime report for the borough, compiled by CrimeRate.co.uk. This is what I found: 

“Ossett is among the top 20 most dangerous small towns in West Yorkshire, and is the 49th most dangerous overall out of West Yorkshire’s 118 towns, villages, and cities. The overall crime rate in Ossett in 2022 was 88 crimes per 1,000 people. This compares favourably to West Yorkshire’s overall crime rate, coming in 31% lower than the West Yorkshire rate of 126 per 1,000 residents. For England, Wales, and Northern Ireland as a whole, Ossett is the 196th most dangerous small town, and the 1,118th most dangerous location out of all towns, cities, and villages.” 

So far, so bad. But not the worst. However, the report went on to record that Ossett had since become the worst small town in the region for “other” crime, including vehicle theft and shoplifting. Overall, the most common offences involved violence and sexual assault, with 952 such crimes recorded in 2022, up 13 per cent on the previous year. 

According to Gill – an ardent Labour supporter – Ossett’s current troubles have their origins in the Thatcher years, when the mines closed, manufacturing virtually ceased and social services went into a tailspin. First the Blair years, then thirteen years of Tory rule, under five prime ministers, finished the job, she says, so that boys and girls entering their teens no long show any respect either to their elders or to the system. 

She didn’t have to go on (though she did). What came across loud and clear was that working-class parents are too busy these day trying the make ends meet, leaving their children to “own” the streets and, with no money in their pockets, to lift anything they fancy from shops knowing there is no-one to stop them. 

Turning to CrimeRate again, I looked up the stats for crimes investigated in July of this year, the most recent month for which figures are available. Of the 20 serious crimes the police looked into (and remember, many crimes go unreported in the belief that the police are a waste of time), not one was resolved. Either no suspect was identified or, for reasons that are not disclosed, officers were “unable to prosecute”.  

Some of the trends are said to be easing off, making Ossett “safer,” including anti-social behaviour, bicycle theft, criminal damage and arson. Others, involving drugs, possession of weapons, public order, shoplifting, robbery and mugging are “getting worse”. Violence and sexual assault are among the crimes getting worse fastest. Last year, 41 offences for every thousand residents in this category were reported in Ossett, up from 31 per thousand in 2019. 

Is it any wonder that Gill and Glyn feel a weight rolling off their shoulders when they drive off the ferry at St Malo or Roscoff? Their stone cottage in Brittany, overlooked by a magnificent beech tree hundreds of years old, is – as used to be said in England – “safe as houses”. The only recent crime of which they are aware in their neighbourhood was committed by hornets, who made a nest in their outhouse over the summer and were removed without charge after being reported to the local mairie. 

Most worrying of all is the fact that Ossett is not alone in facing a crime wave in which a majority of the culprits are of school age. The opening sentence of the CrimeRate report states, if you recall, that Ossett is only “the 49th most dangerous overall out of West Yorkshire’s 118 towns, villages, and cities.” And West Yorkshire is home to less than 2 per cent of Britain’s population. 

To provide context, Croydon, where a 15-year-old schoolgirl was stabbed to death this week, is officially 1.6 per cent “safer” than Ossett. Leeds, by contrast, is 97 per cent “more dangerous”.

It is also worth noting that Marseille, France’s second city, has one of the highest crime rates in the western world and that crime generally in France is on the rise, especially in its larger towns and cities. In this respect at least, the UK is far from isolated. 

Full disclosure: I did not bother to call West Yorkshire Police for comment on this article. For what would be the point? They would say that they are over-stretched, short-handed and under-funded but that they investigate every crime that is reported to them in the hope of bring those responsible to justice. They might even claim that they are doing a better job than the numbers would suggest. And I have no doubt they would mean what they say. Meanwhile, if Gill and Glyn want to visit their friends three streets away in Ossett, they wait until the taxi driver outside toots his horn. 

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Each of the claims made has some basis in fact, which is what makes them superficially believable. But they are exaggerated in the manner of a political cartoon. The first is that Germany has totally lost the run of itself and is about to become the Sick Man of Europe. The second is that France has become ungovernable. The belief that mass immigration is rapidly turning Europe into a demographic colony of North and sub-Saharan Africa is claim number three, while, as icing on the cake, the contention is that in the midst of the Ukraine war “Europe,” as distinct from Nato, has been about as much use as a chocolate teapot. 

Have I left something out? Well, perhaps that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and her anonymous, “unelected” colleagues are hopelessly out of their depth, not just on Ukraine but on just about everything else. The euro as a rival to the dollar? A green Europe by 2030? The citizens of the 27 persuaded that Brussels knows how to stop the small boats crossing the Mediterranean? Ho-ho-ho … don’t make us laugh!  

Of the four critiques, the most novel is the first – the unprecedented loss of faith in the power of Germany, which is our topic for today.  No one could deny that these are tough times for the EU’s dominant economy. Germany makes things and it makes them well – not just cars (BMW, Mercedes, Audi, VW), but machinery and tools (Siemens, Bosch, BASF), pharmaceuticals (Bayer, Merck, BASF again), shipbuilding and marine engines (Thyssen-Krupp, Meyer Werft, Blohm & Voss) to say nothing of chemicals, metals, cement, sportswear (Adidas) and – let us never forget – beer. 

German manufacturing is awash with big names. What they have in common is that, having long been on top, they have a long way to fall. With the world struggling to avoid recession and with energy prices in the stratosphere, demand for German goods has fallen sharply while production costs have soared. High interest rates and inflation: cause and effect. But does anyone doubt that when the global upswing comes – which it will – Germany will not take early advantage and fight for its place at or near the top of the rankings? 

When the world is no longer interested in cars, trucks, white goods, machine tools, medicines and steel – that is when Germany will give up and declare bankruptcy: not before. 

More serious in terms of Berlin’s place in the firmament is the fact that its political system has been knocked sideways by the emergence in depth of the Far Right in the shape of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), focused as it is on immigration, “traditional” values and a rejection of rapid progress towards the goal of Net Zero. 

The balance of power, already complicated by a slackening in support for the Greens, has been made worse by the failure of both of the two big parties, the conservative CDU, and the centre-left SPD, to produce inspiring leaders. They used to do so on a production-line basis (Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl). But starting with the late-period Angela Merkel, followed by the weak and unimaginative Olaf Scholz, the conveyor belt has stuttered and come to a halt. Cometh the hour, cometh the ordinary has been the case for at least the last five years, and so far no one new has appeared to restore the Old Order to anything like its former self. 

But that, too, will pass. The risk is that the AfD, surfing a nationalist wave, will make it into government next time round, allied perhaps with Bavaria’s CSU and the Free Democrats, though not with the CDU. The greater likelihood is that a strong leader from the centre will push through to keep the country focused on wealth creation. Immigration will play an important role whatever happens. The hope has to be that someone, somewhere will come up with something to hold back the tide. But should this prove not to be the case, then not just Germany but the whole of Europe, including the UK, faces an uncertain future. 

Ever since the early days of the Wirtschaftswunder, when the post-war federal republic, bolstered by Marshall Aid, began to rebuild its industrial capacity, Germany has proved itself cautiously outward-looking. The pervasive feeling that the nation should remain homogenous was overcome by the needs of high-density industrial production. Agreements were signed to attract labour from elsewhere in Europe, most obviously Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain, while the door to the Communist East Bloc was always ajar. Later, in the 1960s, more than a million Turks arrived as gastarbeiter, though it was only relatively recently that these and their descendants were granted citizenship. 

Then, in 2015, with the Middle East ablaze, Chancellor Merkel extended an invitation to some half a million Iraqi, Syrian and Afghan asylum-seekers, a majority of whom were in fact no more than economic migrants. In part, this was a humanitarian gesture, but it was also in response to the nation’s falling population. What quickly became clear was that the new arrivals – almost all of them Muslim – were not universally welcome. Resentment rooted in racism combined with a growing fear of Islamism. Eight years on, the racism has subsided, but the frustration of German workers and families living through hard economic times while newcomers with a different culture and religion take up jobs, school places and hospital beds, often leapfrogging the lines for public housing, has left its mark. It is at the intersection of economic difficulty and the growing numbers of “alien” workers that the AfD has found its strongest support. 

It is impossible to know how the various developments will play out over the next five to ten years. Support for Fortress Europe is growing, but the fact is that, short of a takeover of the means of production by AI, the economy cannot function at full capacity without a continuing influx of workers. All that can be said with certainty is that the country is going through a painful readjustment. A rightwards shift in attitude by voters has not been helped by the widespread perception that the industrial and corporate élite, long noted for its close collaboration with the unions, has discovered that labour, even at the highest levels, can be found more cheaply in countries beyond Germany’s borders. 

But if the workers are affronted, they, too, look abroad these days in search of a bargain. As in France and the UK, the shops are full of goods from China, South Korea and Vietnam. Poland has at the same time become the go-to place for everyday materials that were once a domestic preserve. Online, this phenomenon is even more pronounced. 

Does this mean game over? Far from it. Germany is not about to follow the example of Brünnhilde in the Ring Cycle, closing the gates of death around her. The great machine that encompasses the Ruhrgebiet, Bavaria, Stuttgart, Berlin and Leipzig is re-tooling. The reliance on oil and gas from Russia (a blindspot in Merkel’s vision of the future that her biographers will link to her upbringing in the GDR) has given way to secure contracts with Norway, the Netherlands, France and the US. At the same time, investment in electronics and the digital economy, including artificial intelligence, have joined engineering on the new industrial agenda. Young Germans today don’t look to the lathe and the assembly line as the primary bringers of prosperity, but to information and communication technology, sustainable energy and the rapidly-evolving service sector.  

Jump ahead ten years, with the Ukraine crisis resolved and the green revolution in full swing and it is hard not to see Germany at or near the forefront of what will be happening in Europe’s evolved economy. 

In considering the future of the EU, this leaves the alleged ungovernability of France, the threat posed by mass immigration and the below-par performance of the current European Commission, with space, too, for the triumph of the will that is twenty-first-century Poland. We will return to each of these in challenging the false claim that “Europe” is on its last legs. In the meantime, be in no doubt that the central role of Germany in determining the continent’s future is very far from over. 

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De Gaulle could afford to scoff at the ambitions of his followers and underlings, who lived in his shadow, until the évenéments of 1968 put the skids under him. Mitterrand regarded the presidency as his right and stamped down hard on anyone who dared suggest that the State was perhaps not him. But, with the possible exception of François Hollande, who in 2017 refused to stand for re-election out of sheer embarrassment, all serving presidents have demanded that they be honoured and respected until the moment the removals men turn up to take their effects back to their equivalent of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. 

What is different this time is that, with nearly four years remaining of the Macron Supremacy, the contenders on all sides are already up and running. It is as if France has become America, where little more than a year into a President’s second term the shift from Hail to the Chief to lame duck can be completed inside of 12 months.  

Marine Le Pen, of the Far-Right, is already acting like a President-in-waiting. No longer a rabble-rouser, she has worked effectively as doyenne of the Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National) to convey the sense that mother knows best and that she is the strong, yet sensible leader for which France is waiting. 

On the further right, Éric Zemmour, the Old Pretender, at the head of his Réconquete movement, may go for gold himself or he may give way to his protegé,  Marion Maréchal (Le Pen’s estranged niece), just 33, who still believes that the old ways are best when it comes to populism. Neither has any hope of winning the prize, but they could muddy the water. 

On the centre-right, the conch has passed to Éric Ciotti, leader of Les Republicains for the last ten months, who sees himself as the man to end the humiliating exclusion of the conservatives from power since the fall of Nicolas Sarkozy – the King of Bling – in 2012. Ciotti, a former president of the Alpes-Maritimes department, centred on Nice, is a hardliner and a street-fighter, who says he will be hard on crime and harder on criminals, including illegal immigrants. His weakness many prove to be that France has heard it all before. 

But then again, it has heard it all before from all of them. 

The Far Left, beneath the banner extravagantly held aloft by the firebrand Jean-Luc-Mélenchon, featured prominently in the protests that greeted Macron’s decision to increase the age of retirement from 62 to 64. The 72-year-old, France’s Jeremy Corbyn, exudes messianic certainties. The problem for Mélenchon is that that particular fight was lost, leaving him exposed as the mouse that roared. Not only that, but his party, France Insoumise (France Unbowed) can only function effectively in cooperation with the currently moribund Socialist Party (which has ambitions of its own) and the Greens, neither of whom regard the veteran marxist as a realistic candidate second time round, for the country’s top post. 

So where does Emmanuel Macron fit into all this? He will not, or course, be standing. He would dearly love a third term, but would be advised to concentrate on his time remaining. The President is a self-regarding smarty-pants. There’s no denying that. If he had been named Chanteclere, after the cock who believed it was his crowing that caused the Sun to rise each morning, few would be surprised. But he is up there with De Gaulle and François Mitterrand as one of the few leaders of the Fifth Republic likely to be remembered, if not exactly honoured, for his contribution to the life of the nation. 

In the ordinary course of events, as a President in the the first half of his second term, Macron could expect to be above the fray, promoting any outstanding signature legislation while fully engaging in the great international debates of the day – in this case, Russia and Ukraine, climate change, what to do about an overbearing China, mass immigration and unrest in what used to be known as French Equatorial Africa. Sadly for him, his influence in the first four of these is strictly limited, while in the Sahel French troops and French diplomats have been reduced to helpless bystanders, elbowed out by rebels and Moscow-backed mercenaries. 

It may be that Macron will have one more hurrah. His stewardship of the economy has been quietly successful, France, with its inbuilt advantage of large-scale nuclear power, has left Germany standing and has also outpaced the UK. Unemployment is down and growth, though slow, is steady. An export drive that works could do wonders for his ratings. On the overseas front, the Ukraine crisis could move in his favour, allowing him to capitalise on his relative good standing with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. He might even have some success on the EU front, lining himself up for a future tilt at the presidency of the Commission or European Council. 

So, all to play for and everything to lose. It was one of Macron’s key selling points in 2017 that he represented a clean break with a broken past. Sarkozy looked sleazy, Hollande just looked broken. En Marche, the party and movement he founded in 2016, boasted of being an ideology-free zone, in which good ideas were welcome from whichever point of the compass. But the years have taken their toll. The gilets-jaune, the railway workers, pension reform, most of all Covid, sapped the reformer’s strength, leaving him still standing but less steady on his feet. 

It used to be that En Marche (now, with no hint of irony, Renaissance) could be whatever you wanted it to be. Seven years on, no one knows what the hell it is. No wonder that the party’s big beasts, like interior minister Gérald Dermamin and finance minister Bruno Le Maire, both from the dominant right of the party, and Gabriel Attal, the intensely ambitious budget minister and former government spokesman, from the left, are known to be weighing their positions. The Macron years came in with a bang. If the President is not careful, they could go out with a whimper. 

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By definition, Pascal’s verdict on the state of play in contemporary France is not widely shared. Instead, the grumbling is audible, even when nothing is said. It’s like a low murmur of discontent that stands in for an actual conversation. In 2021, the complaint was that people were dying of Covid and it was all the government’s fault – that is to say, Emmanuel Macron’s fault. In fact, after a dicey start, France came though the pandemic better than most. Six months ago, it was the age of retirement, raised from 62 to 64 (still two years less than the EU average) that raised the nation’s hackles. The French took to the streets in their hundreds of thousands to show that they could not, and would not, accept this scandalous measure, aimed at making them all work until they dropped. Except that they have. The trade union movement that vowed to overturn the measure these days makes little or no reference to it. Nor does the press. 

Simultaneously, there was the rage over police tactics. The French want order on the streets. They expect to see armed officers on the beat and they support the use of force to root out disruptive elements. What they resent is when they are seen as the disruptive element, as when demonstrators were beaten back during riots that left cars ablaze and shops looted in the name of The People. 

Later, when a traffic cop in Paris shot dead a Muslim teenager at a routine stop, the young people of the banlieues – nearly all of them Muslim or black – rose up in force, demanding justice. Most French people could see their point. This didn’t stop them calling for a strong police response. The same split personality has accompanied attempts to kerb the spread of religion-centred Muslim identity. Just this week, Macron and his new education minister, 34-year-old Gabriel Attal, have come under attack (a) for banning Muslim girls from wearing the abaya (the long robe worn past puberty in conformity with Islamic teaching) at school, and (b) for not doing enough to enforce laïcité, the separation of Church and State. 

In the meantime, the French economy has emerged from both the pandemic and the inflationary pressures resulting from the war in Ukraine in a better state than most of its neighbours, including Germany and the UK. French corporations and businesses are reporting record profits; wages and productivity are on the rise; unemployment is down; taxes on business have been relaxed; obstacles in the way of high-tech startups have been removed; and inward investment is at a twenty-first century high. 

Cue much gnashing of teeth and a growing chorus of indignation from the far left and the far right – fronted by the quasi-marxist Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the chameleon-like populist Marine le Pen, both, until last year, friends of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. If there is a lesson to be learned, it may be that the Centre cannot present itself as such – as, say, La Partie du Centre – but only as a current tendency expressed by one or other of the two parties on either side of the dialectical divide. 

Last year, Macron won a second term in the Élysée, but only by the skin of his teeth. Marine Le Pen ran him a close second, while Mélenchon, in charge of a rag-bag coalition of the Left, came in a respectable third. Two months later, in elections to the National Assembly, the pattern was reinforced, with Macron’s En Marche party (rebranded, as Renaissance, a title absolutely no one uses) remaining the largest single party but in a minority overall. The consequence was inevitable. The President’s authority plummeted overnight, while his enemies schemed (separately) to make his life, and that of the centre, unworkable and miserable. 

Thus, as Tony Blair would say, we are where we are. The government is weak, but still in charge, and the Assembly is a madhouse, driven entirely by ambition. 

It should be said at once that the Macron government has made serious mistakes, mostly arising from the President’s aloof, yet chippy manner. He can’t help himself. In 2017, having introduced himself as head of state by addressing members of the Assembly and Senate from the throne room in Versailles – built for the Sun King Louis XIV – he recently chose the same venue at which to greet 200 international business leaders, including Elon Musk, beneath the rubric “Choose France”. 

Just last week, in seeking to persuade the current crop of deputies and senators to give up their foolish antipathy to his reign, his address was delivered in the Great Hall of the Legion d’honneur where, six months previously he granted Volodymyr Zalensky the Legion’s highest rank, the Grand’Croix, for which the embattled war leader, bent on acquiring heavy weapons, was no doubt supremely grateful. 

On the subject of Ukraine, Macron’s record is decidedly mixed. Photographs of him taken at the wrong end of Putin’s Big Table during his cartoon-like attempt to dissuade the dictator from launching his invasion, will last long in the nation’s folk memory, rather like the image of François Hollande on his chauffeured motor scooter when setting out to visit his mistress. 

Later, having learned his lesson, Macron shouldered his way into Nato’s front line (though, humiliatingly, he still had to take second place to Boris Johnson, a man he despised as a political bad joke). France has since become a main supplier of big guns and missiles to Ukraine, but Macron remains the most likely top European leader to call openly for a grand peace conference – probably not to be held at Versailles – at which Zelensky would barter land for peace. 

On Africa, the picture is far from mixed. France is on the run from its residual empire, once predicated on the use of the French franc and the assurance that any revolutionary nonsense would meet with a firm response from the Légion Étrangère and gendarmerie. This is not Macron’s fault. The tilt from Paris began long before he got his feet underneath his ornate desk at the Élysée and has gathered pace during his term in office because of the spread of Islamist violence and the arrival in force of Russia’s Wagner mercenaries. What is beyond dispute is that he has done nothing to reverse the process. If the current President is not the reason why what used to be known as French Equatorial Africa has turned its back on the mother country, he has certainly been left to carry the can. It must be galling for him to have to beg the new military junta in Niger for permission to keep the French embassy open in Niamey. 

With la Rentrée underway, Macron and his ministers are struggling to come up with a legislative programme worthy of the name. There is much rhetoric concerning a more robust industrial strategy. There will be healthcare reform and a new, more determined approach to climate change built around green energy, including a wave of new-generation nuclear power stations. Red tape and bureaucracy are, in theory at least, moving into the government’s sights, along with a necessary reappraisal of the military. What is lacking, up to now at least, is the necessary legislation to get any of this underway. But that may come. Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne has survived the summer and wields a mean clipboard. 

All in all, France is not at the crossroads (it never is). More accurately, it is another kilometer or two along a bumpy road marked by route barré signs that the Opposition – united only by their loathing of Macron – hope will make government a hopeless quest. What Left and Right fail to see is that the man in their sights has more than three-and-a-half years remaining of his time in office and French presidents are not best known for throwing in the towel. “What is going on?” critics once asked of the state of the UK under the seemingly hapless Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson. Wilson’s answer passed into legend: “I know what is going on. I am going on.” Emmanuel Macron is cut from much the same cloth, but by a better tailor. 

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The answer, I think we can all agree, does not lie in Far Left dreamonomics. Marxism, as such, has never been tried in the UK, but very few would see it as the answer to a nation’s prayer. 

Jeremy Corbyn’s modest 1960s terraced home in Islington is said to be worth at least a million pounds. If the former Commissar put it up for sale, how would he feel if a trade union colleague with a young family offered him a quarter of its current market value? My guess is, he would hold the offer up to his weak eye. But if he was able to buy a smaller, well-set-up apartment down the road, closer to the Tube, for a lesser sum, leaving him in profit, would he go for it, or would he still hold out, hoping for more? I have no idea, but then most of us are not Jeremy Corbyn. 

The Lionesses who reached the final of this year’s Women’s World Cup in Sydney reportedly earn thirty-five times less than their male counterparts. Mary Earps, the England goalkeeper, is paid a salary of around £150,000. By contrast, Jordan Pickford, the England men’s and Everton keeper, is paid some five-and-a-half million pounds. 

There are, surely, two wrongs here. Earps is paid too little, but Pickford is paid far too much. If Premier League wages came down 90 per cent, that would still leave the men, like  “Rich” Harry Kane and “poor” Harry Maguire pulling in high multiples of the wages their fans live on. Would that be wrong? Would the idea of “the market” not be able to withstand such an assault on its fundamental premise?   

The existing free-for-all means that the haves live big – indeed very big – while the rest, increasingly, have to watch the pennies. Even dyed-in-the-wool Tories know this. 

In business, Sir James Dyson, who invented a better vacuum cleaner back in the 1980s, has amassed a personal fortune of £23 billion. In 2019, he moved his tax residency to Singapore but owns three luxury homes in England as well as a reported 32,000 acres of prime farmland. 

Few would dispute that Dyson’s bagless vacuum-cleaners were a smart idea. Visitors to motorway service areas and pub toilets who have benefited from his system-related hand-driers would probably agree that they are a step up from paper towels or those cloth rolls that always seem to get stuck on the first tug. 

But twenty-three billion pounds! 

Dyson is not, of course, the only one whose wealth is worth more than its weight in gold. There are an estimated 171 billionaires in the UK right now, controlling an aggregate £684 billion. According to the Sunday Times Rich List, the industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe, now domiciled in Monaco, is even better off than Dyson, with a net worth of £30 billion, give or take the price of an entire street in Camden. Ratcliffe is in the bidding to purchase Manchester United for as much as £6 billion. If he succeeds, he will be one of only a handful of Britons who could look down their noses at the sort of money earned by star footballers. 

Top executives – CEOs and the like – seem generally to be remunerated on the basis that they love money and expect to be paid a lot of it even when they are sacked. Their expensive suits, chauffeur-driven cars and annual bonuses are more a measure of their self-worth than of their typical year-on-year accomplishment. Beyond “growing” their company – an endeavour that is rarely achieved by any one individual – their aim is to accumulate wealth. By the time they retire to their estates in Surrey, the Cotswolds or Cheshire, it is measured in the tens of millions.

The average wage in Britain, meanwhile, is – depending on where you live – between £25,000 and £35,000. Millions, including a majority of those on part-time or zero-hours contracts, make do on annual incomes of less than £20,000. 

Which brings me back to my central theme. If the two Sir James’s each retired with a net worth of one or two billion pounds; if Jordan Pickford and Mary Earps were both paid £250,000; if the head of Thames Water earned a bonus only when she stopped pumping sewage into rivers; if the average price of a three-bedroom semi in London fell by 50 per cent; and if the average wage for ordinary Britons rose to £35,000, would the UK not be a better place in which to live? 

The problem is, of course, how do we get there? How do you convince a sales manager in Tufnell Park that a phased-in property slump would result in a more fair and equitable housing market? How do you persuade an ambitious Premier League footballer to accept that under a new cost-conscious dispensation, he will end up, aged 35, with only £10 million in the bank, not 80 million? And what incentive would there be for a young PPE graduate to enter the corporate world if he – or she – ended up no better off than the Prime Minister or the head of the Civil Service? 

The answer to all three questions is clear: no way, no way and none. Britain, and the world generally, is caught in a vicious upwards spiral in which the rich are getting richer faster, the middle classes are struggling and the poor – in their millions – are circling the drain. Keir Starmer and his team will no doubt do their best in the few years allotted them next autumn and they may succeed in smoothing out some of the rougher edges of the new feudalism. But they will be swimming against the tide. 

The only way to transform the present system would be by way of revolution, with everything deemed capitalist swept away so that we started again from Year Zero. And that’s not going to work. Instead we need an honest conversation about spreading wealth more fairly.

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The new afternoon average for the Rhone Valley, stretching from a little south of Lyon all the way to Marseille and Montepellier, is in the mid-to-high 30s, with 40 and above not unusual. Further north, where the thermometer is more likely to register 25 degrees in mid-afternoon, violent storms have raged intermittently throughout the summer, sometimes extending into the upland regions of the Massif Central and the Alps. 

Only in the far north and northwest, from Brittany through Normandy and the Mayenne to Picardy and Calais, is the situation more or less stable. In these green regions, July and August have in fact seen more rain and less sunshine than usual, disappointing those Parisians who eschewed the Riviera this year in a bid to avoid what they were advised would be an unbearable heatwave, or canicule. 

Drought, the inevitable consequence of too much Sun, is widespread throughout France, not only in the South, where restrictions on use are widespread, and feuds have broken out between farmers anxious to conserve their access to wells and ponds. 

The water table in two-thirds of the country has dropped significantly. Reservoirs and rivers have fallen to near-record lows. Acquifiers long considered reliable are drying up. Adding insult to injury, much the water resulting from the heavy rainfall that has often accompanied the high temperatures has either avaporated or else run off the hard earth without reaching more than a few centimetres below the surface. 

Thus far, there have been fewer wildfires than was the case last year, when 72,000 hectares (178,000 acres) of land were scorched and some 60,000 people, including holiday-makers, had to be evacuated. France is better prepared in 2023. There are strict regulations in place. Not only officials, but ordinary citizens, are much more vigilant. The number of firefighting aircraft, known as water-bombers, has been increased from 38 to 47, and some 3,600 reserve pompiers have been placed on full alert, ready to be sent to wherever fires break out. 

From an economic perspective, the prospect of boiling hot summers in the years to come is not encouraging. Farmers – especially wine-growers – have adapted to local conditions down the centuries. This summer production of barley in France actually rose by 8.2 per cent as a result of high rainfall in the central belt in June, and some wine regions, including Champagne and Burgundy, anticipate above-average crops. But adaptation has limits. Farmers depend on sunshine and warmth to ripen their crops. But after a prolonged canicule, corn yields drop and grapes wither on the wine.  Most of all, farmers require a steady supply of water. If they don’t get what they need, there will in future be less of everything and everything will cost more, from fine wines to frozen peas. 

Away from the countryside, the residents of towns and cities expect to be able to turn on their taps and flush their toilets in the reasonable belief that water will flow. And everybody, whether on a factory production line in Toulouse or in a hotel in Cannes, demands to stay cool even when it is 38 degrees in the shade – a human right (as it is now seen) that has led to a surge in demand for fans and air-conditioning units, the use of which is placing a strain on the national grid at a time when the Government has been doing its utmost to hold down prices. 

For the moment, tourism across France is once more thriving after the Covid-based recession. Paris is jam-packed with Americans and Chinese. The beaches of La Rochelle and Les Sables d’Oléron are, as Jeremy Corbyn would say, “rammed”. But the heat is too much along the Côte d’Azur, where the temperature as I write, on Wednesday afternoon, has moved between 34 and 40 degrees. 

As for the beneficiaries of climate change, Brittany stands out. Not only are house prices in the verdant Northwest rising faster than almost anywhere else in France, there is even talk of new vineyards being planned to take up the slack created by falling production further south. 

What is happening in France is not, of course, unique. The situation in much of Italy, Spain and Portugal is worse, as it is across the entirety of Greece and the southern Balkans. Even Germany and the Benelux countries – to say nothing of the UK and Ireland – have been impacted by changing weather patterns. And the same is true of large parts of the rest of the world, including, right now, California. 

So should we all be beating our breasts and glueing ourselves to the M25? Probably not, at least not yet. But even those who have no time for the foolishness of Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil are increasingly aware of the need to do something about the Big Heat. They may or may not endorse the goal of Net Zero by 2050, but they do get annoyed when their taps run dry and they do see the sense in retreating to the beachside bar when the sun outside puts on its after-burners. The arguments over climate change will continue whatever the weather. What is needed, regardless of political loyalties, is a general acceptance that governments and local authorities must react, and react fast, to whatever conditions look to be coming down the line. 

We would all agree that water companies should be compelled to fix leaks as a matter of urgency – urgent meaning, as Churchill was wont to say, action this day. Fines are not enough. Fines are baked in. If the directors and their top management teams can‘t, or won’t, do what has to be done, their franchises should be withdrawn with minimal compensation. 

Homes need to be better ventilated as well as better insulated. Geothermal units have to be made cheaper and more efficient and adapted as a matter of course to provide cool air in summer as well as warm air in winter. New-generation solar power and wind power are proving their worth wherever they have been tried. If there are going to be more heatwaves and more storms, we should at least try to make the best of them. 

Europe’s towns and cities must plant more trees and provide more fountains and more shaded public areas. Populations living south of the continent’s equivalent of the Mason-Dixon Line (roughly from Bordeaux to Munich and on to Kyiv) have to be a lot more sparing in their use of water, ultimately the most vital natural resource of them all. Individuals everywhere have to increase their functional awareness of the dangers of too much sun. A light tan is one thing, a deeper bronze is an invitation to skin cancer. When factoring in the right sun cream, it makes sense to start the count at 50. 

In short, society has to become more grown-up in its adjustment to extreme weather. We need to act as if there might be no tomorrow, which if we don’t there might not be.  

Other than that, enjoy the rest of the summer. As Mungo Jerry said, “Life’s for living, yeah, that’s our philoso-fee.” 

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Ireland – the poorest country in Europe in 1970 – has just released eight billion euros (£6.85 billion) from its swollen sovereign wealth fund to tackle the country’s chronic housing shortage. It has so much money that, like the old woman who lived in a shoe, it doesn’t know what to do. 

All of the above EU member states enjoy higher household incomes than Britain. Spain and Portugal are not far behind, and, after a torrid few years, Italy is once more making strides. Poland, whose plumbers and electricians were blamed for dragging down wages in England in the run-up to Brexit, looks set to join the Richer-than-Blighty club in the next ten years, along with the Czech Republic and Slovakia. 

If you don’t believe me – if you think I’m making it up – read the Daily Telegraph, which in recent months has begun to despair of Britain. The headline on a piece by one of its columnists this morning, read, “If you’re under 50, it’s time to jump ship – get out of Britain while you can”. Another, from last week, ran, “Britain isn’t in ‘managed’ decline. The country is about to fall off a cliff edge”.  Alternatively, glance at the latest report by the Swiss bank UBS in which the UK is relegated to the second tier of global wealth, behind not only most of its European neighbours, but its one-time colonies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Thirteen years have gone by since David Cameron blagged his way into Downing Street, to be followed by a succession of short-lived Tory prime ministers, each until Rishi Sunak, the too-little-too-late candidate, worse than the one before. Post-Cameron Britain has acquired the reputation of a nation in free fall. What sustains it in the main is a combination of past riches, what remains of its manufacturing heritage and the hard-pressed wheeler-dealers of the City of London. 

It is easy to blame Brexit for everything that has gone wrong. In 2013, Britain boasted that it would overtake Germany as the EU’s richest economy by 2030. All that was holding it back, according to supporters of Vote Leave, was the fact that it was shackled to a corpse. How does that analysis stack up today? Not well. But the nation’s steepening decline since goes far deeper than its tortured relationship with the EU. 

What seems to have happened is that, around the time of the millennium, the British lost confidence in themselves and no longer trust the traditional ruling class. Having ditched the superiority complex that came with empire, they have ended up simultaneously contemptuous of themselves and others. It is as if something vital inside their heads has been switched off. Once, Britain was the workshop of the world. Today, most landmark companies, along with the utilities that supplied them, have been sold off to foreign bidders. It began with the family silver; now it’s the wedding china. Every good idea, every start-up, comes with a sale price attached. “Stop me and buy one” could be the slogan of British business. Like Spain and Portugal in the seventeen-hundreds, Britain in the twenty-first century has come to accept that its best years, indeed its best centuries, are behind it. It is looking to retire, and its only concern is that its descent into genteel poverty, with a triple-locked pension, will not result in widespread social unrest. 

When was the last time we did something truly impressive? The opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics? The Queen’s funeral? Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War were the last hurrahs of British determinism. The NHS is a disaster; our armed forces couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag; Parliament is a joke; young people, high on entitlement, no longer link success to hard work. The economy is weak and dysfunctional, as are the police and public bodies. Our universities – once among our proudest boasts – depend these days on overseas students, not the ill-educated and deluded home products, to keep the wolf from the door.

The only mystery is that would-be immigrants, from Africa and central Asia, still believe that London and the Home Counties offer rich pickings for new arrivals. Perhaps they do so in the well-founded belief that they will quickly rise to the top, trampling over the natives for whom ambition has become the hope that the state will look after them or that they will win the Lottery or triumph on Britain’s Got Talent or – if all else fails, which it probably will – that they will thrive as influencers on TikTok. 

All this after 13 years, and counting, of Tory rule under a series of seemingly random prime ministers, none of whom could answer the only question that matters: What can be done to lift the UK out of the Slough of Despond? 

We can surely agree on one thing: the Conservatives haven’t the foggiest notion. If they knew what needed to be done and how to do it, we wouldn’t be in our current predicament. We would be up there with the Belgians and the Irish. The Tories are not only incompetent, they are corrupt. Which is why the country has to take what remains of its courage in its hands and vote Keir Starmer and his Labour Party into power at the next election. Starmer may be a tad dull, and his top team are almost wholly untried. Maybe they will make things even worse. It could be, if I’m spared, that I will have to write another version of this piece ten years from now. But what have we got to lose? Maybe – just maybe – Labour will stop the rot. We’ve seen what the other lot achieved – sweet bugger-all. It’s time for a new beginning. 

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The transfer this week from Tottenham to Bayern Munich of the England captain Harry Kane was a melodrama dressed up as a psychodrama. Would he or wouldn’t he? Could he bear to walk away from White Hart Lane? Would the Germans pull the plug? And would the Spurs chairman Daniel Levy let him go? 

In the end (despite being held up at Stansted airport while awaiting the final all-clear), he went, as he was surely bound to do. Bayern paid Tottenham a reported £100 million to secure his signature, plus, it is said, an agreement that Kane would be paid £400,000 a week – £20,800,000 a year. Levy had finally cottoned on that he either took the money now or his boy would exit at the end of the season, when he would be a free agent, leaving the north London club with nothing but memories.  

We are told that Kane took the decision to forsake the setup he had been part of since he was 11 years-old in order, at last, to be part of a winning team. Spurs have been the nearly-club of the Premier League for all of its history, never winning the title, while failing, unlike Chelsea, Arsenal, both Manchester clubs and Liverpool, to establish themselves as one of Europe’s élite clubs. 

Kane, who turned 30 last month, is Spurs’ and England’s most successful striker, having scored 350 goals for club and country. But he never managed to get his hands on any silverware. Not once was he awarded a winner’s medal, not even for the lowly League Cup. 

In Munich, he can confidently expect to attach his name to at least a couple of Bundesliga titles and, in all likelihood, the Champions League. Unless the experiment goes horribly wrong, he will be feted by his new fans and treated like a true football God. 

Now let’s look at the money. At Spurs, where he was the unquestioned number one draw, he was reportedly paid a “mere” £10.4 million a year, a reflection of the fact, daft though it sounds, that he grew up with the club and never had to be bought for more than an everyday mega salary. At Bayern, his wages will double overnight, meaning, assuming he stays for the duration of his contract, that his net worth on retirement will be something like £80 million, plus millions more from sponsorship – say £100 million in total. 

How’s that for a pound of mince?, as my old news editor at the Sunday Telegraph used to say. One-hundred-million-pounds, for playing football! 

And I haven’t even mentioned Beckham, Messi or Ronaldo. Or tennis. Or Formula 1. 

But you get my point. Even journeymen footballers who leave the top-flight in their mid-thirties having toiled at several clubs without ever setting the heather on fire, can hope to retire with ten or fifteen million pounds in the bank. 

Their idol, Harry Kane, is a formidable goal-scorer, who in retirement will probably seek to increase his wealth through “shrewd” property investments. But all over the UK, untold millions will end up with a net worth considerably less than what Kane will earn between getting out of bed on Monday morning and kicking off at Bayern’s Allianz Arena on a Saturday afternoon. 

Which brings me to Harry Maguire. I can’t help it. I feel sorry for Maguire, whose career, once solid, came adrift at Manchester United – so much so that he has had to accept demotion to West Ham, a club, like Spurs, that always seems to be less than the sum of its parts. I wish him well. I want him to show the bullies at Old Trafford that he is still a player to be reckoned with, not only for the Hammers, but for England. 

So how much is “poor” Harry worth? Bear in mind that the average full-time salary across much of the UK is less than £30,000 and that the state pension, as it stands, is less than £10,000 a year. Well, if the accountants at Google are to be believed, Maguire made a little under £8.5 million a year at United, which paid a record £78 million for him in 2016 in the mistaken belief that he was someone else. Over the years, whether or not he was appreciated on the pitch, he has amassed a net worth of £20 million. He is strong as a horse and, aged 30, should end up with more like £30-35 million, which in my book is a result. 

Will he ever be part of a winning team, like “Rich” Harry? Maybe, maybe not. But he won’t have to count the pennies. I would expect him to stay in the best hotels, drive the most expensive cars and retire to a McMansion in Cheshire, sending his children to private schools (to insulate them from the envy of their impecunious peers) and holidaying at his luxury villas in Spain and Florida. 

Jealous? Moi? Of course. But there is surely something wrong with a game that doesn’t merely reward excellence, as it should, but showers its strutting gladiators with levels of wealth and prestige that very few men (and fewer women) in other spheres can ever hope to achieve. Are we really back to bread and circuses? Wouldn’t it be enough if footballers earned the same as the head of product development at Rolls-Royce, or a national newspaper editor, or a chief constable or, at a pinch, the Director of Public Prosecutions?  

That said, I hope Rich Harry wins the Ballon d’Or with Bayern along with a clutch of medals and that Poor Harry scores a hat trick when West Ham take on Man United at the London Stadium on December 23. The pair of them deserve a break. 

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Right now, however, it is the French economy that is pulling ahead. The CAC 40, France’s truncated equivalent of the Footsie 100, last week posted an aggregate increase in pre-tax profit for its members of 13 per cent for the first six months of this year on turnover up 7.4 per cent. Combined, the country’s grandes enterprises saw first-half net profits hit a record €89 billion. 

Stellantis, the world’s fourth-largest carmaker, boasting Peugeot, Citroën and Fiat among its brands, along with Chrysler, Opel and Dodge, increased its net sales by 12 per cent to a value of €98 billion. At rival Renault, sales were up 27 per cent to a little under €27 billion, while those at Safran, the aerospace and defence group, nudged €11 billion, an increase of 28 per cent. Edenred, a digital payments pioneer, joined in with the usual suspects, recording a 26 per cent rise in revenues, and may be one to watch in the years ahead. 

The biggest winner in terms of gain, was Bouygues (pronouned Bo-ig), the telecoms heavyweight, which registered a 41 per cent growth in sales to a total of €26.13 billion. By contrast, sales at rivals Orange, at €21.5 billion, barely rose,  Overall, 29 of the top 40 were on an upwards trend, including, notably, luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, controlled from Paris by the world’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, which saw sales soar 15 per cent to €42 billion. 

Among the losers (relatively speaking), oil giant TotalEnergies recorded a 17 per cent drop in revenues, but still managed to lead the pack with sales of €108.55 billion. Arcelormittal, part of the Mittal steel empire, saw sales fall by 15.6 per cent, while Societé Générale, France’s third-largest bank, experienced a decline of 7 per cent. BNP-Paribas, the French Number One, stood still, while Crédit Agricole saw turnover improve by a modest 4.2 per cent.  

Airbus, viewed from Paris as a French, rather than a European, national treasure, increased sales by 11 per cent, to a value of €27.7 billion, but growth year-on-year fell by 20 per cent. Trainmaker Alstom, now owned by GE of America but registered in France, has yet to publish its results, as has Eurofins Scientific, a leading provider of testing and support services to the pharmaceutical sector worldwide. Carrefour, Europe’s biggest retailer, employing 320,000 people in 30 countries, saw sales increase by 11 per cent to €45.5 billion. 

L’Oreal, Michelin and Danone were among others heading in the right direction. 

Of interest to the UK, the high-tech weapons manufacturer Thales, whose Belfast plant supplied Ukraine with the acclaimed NLAW anti-tank missile system, saw profits in the first six months of this year jump 5.6 per cent to €8.72 billion. It is having a good war. 

Yet it need hardly be said that not everything is rosy in the garden. Big Manufacturing, Big Tech and Big Banking, to say nothing of Big Perfume, Big Champagne and Big Suitcases, are not the whole of the French economy. The public sector remains bloated and the burden of pension provision has only been eased, not removed, by the government’s enforced increase in the state retirement age from 62 to 64. 

In the first quarter of this year, France recorded growth of just 0.2 per cent, barely above the EU average but trailing far behind not only market leader Poland, at 3.9 per cent, but Portugal, Croatia and Cyprus, as well as Italy and Spain. If recession does hit the Eurozone as a whole in 2024, occasioned by the war in Ukraine and the ongoing slowdown in China, France will almost certainly be among the victims.  

In the meantime, unemployment, though seemingly on a downwards trajectory, remains a worry. At the end of June it stood at 7.1 per cent, down from 7.5 a year earlier and a full 2.4 per cent lower than in 2017, when Emmanuel Macron took over as President. In the UK, the rate is currently around 4 per cent, though more than in France the figure is skewed by the numbers who are economically inactive.  

There are growing concerns, too, about the actual French component of much of the CAC 40. Airbus (EADS) is shared with German and Spanish interests; Stellantis, which inherited little Vauxhall in the UK along with Opel, is determinedly multinational. Alstom is essentially owned by GE; the supermarket chain Casino, with 50,000 employees across the country, has just been bought by the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, who made his money from building coal-fired power stations.

Equally important is the fact that a number of large French corporations are owned or part-owned by the State, including not only Airbus, but EDF, Europe’s largest provider of electricity (100 per cent nationalised this year), Orange the telecoms giant, the national railway company SNCF, Naval Group (a leading builder of submarines), Air France/KLM and the postal service La Poste. French governments do not hold back when it comes to rescuing or sustaining national assets.    

This year, his fifth as President, has not been easy for Macron, whose entire time in office has been beset by insurrection at home and abroad. But in purely business terms, with little fanfare, he has rarely put a foot wrong and the message this month is upbeat. It feels as if France is awakening from a long sleep. 

Listen, if you can bear it, to the front-page editorial in last Saturday’s edition of the centre-right newspaper, Le Figaro. 

“France’s biggest companies are doing well. Very well even. Is the war in Ukraine destabilising the world? Is growth slowing down? Is inflation coming back at a gallop? Are interest rates soaring? Nothing stops their march forward. In an environment that is more complex and unpredictable than ever, our champions are growing their businesses around the world, along with their profitability.”

Written by the paper’s leading economics commentator Gaëtan De Capèle, the editorial goes on to rubbish the “slayers of capitalism,” who he says are “legion” in France. The “disciples of Oxfam,” he says, “making their back-of-an-envelope calculations, will go to great lengths to demonstrate widening inequality, exploitative labour practises and, for good measure, ‘climate crime’.” 

De Capèle is having none of this. Now well into his stride, he tells us that “in the great international melée, there is no possible survival without agility and without profitability … The CAC 40, which so many detest, is a blessing … it represents hundreds of thousands of jobs, gives structure to entire sectors, produces numerous centres of excellence and provides the state with billions in tax revenue.” 

To the sound of trumpets, Figaro’s message is one of unalloyed patriotic pride: “In a country in search of its lost sovereignty, the international presence of its gigantic companies constitutes a precious tool of influence and reconquest. It is an asset that these days we should defend at all costs.” 

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Be that as it may, he still required to know if our home, less the extension, was more than or less than one hundred square metres. Off-hand, I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was probably under. “So less than one hundred square metres? Hmm. Very well. But what about your central heating? What type do you operate.” Electric, I said. “What sort of electric?” I couldn’t think of the French for overnight storage heaters and blustered something that made him laugh. “It really doesn’t matter, Monsieur,” he said, guffawing. “It is not important. Désolé.” And that was that. He rang off. 

Now I have to hope that I haven’t landed myself in the soup. But I don’t think so. To switch metaphors, the bark of the Bercy is often worse than its bite. The problem these days is that everything is done online, so that the paper trail I used to stuff in a drawer has been replaced by my virtual archive, to which I do not possess a reliable key. 

A clue to how things might work out came the following day when I was thanked online for my cooperation and invited to receive each Thursday by email a newsletter listing public information relevant to my activities. Would I care to participate? 

I said I would, and the first newsletter has since landed in my inbox. Item one was a reminder that from August 1, receipts for goods bought in supermarkets and stores across France would only be provided to shoppers on demand. Another triumph for Net Zero, I have to assume, though, to be honest, I have never worked out what I am supposed to do with the slips of paper listing off my purchases. Ought I, scrooge-like, to have checked what was printed out against what I took away in my shopping bags, or should I have pressed them into an album, like postage stamps? Either way, that burden of choice has now been lifted from me. I am relieved. 

Item two informed me that if I was a home-owner I should have informed the ministry by August 1 of the names of everybody living under my roof. Again, I thought I had already done this. But it’s hard to be sure. Given that I may have missed the deadline, I was left wondering what the next step might be. Should I expect the midnight knock? 

“Vos papiers, Monsieur! S’il vous plait.” 

Less discommoding was the discovery that I have “rights” when I check into a French hotel, which is good to know. I have the right under the Penal Code to cancel a reservation, subject to the contract entered into, and I cannot be denied a room on the basis of gender, physical handicap, national origin, weight (too fat?), physical appearance (too ugly?) or sexual orientation. 

The same applies to travelling by coach. Woe betide the bus company that refuses to issue a ticket to anyone who is not a white, heterosexual man, in perfect health wearing a blue two-piece suit and dark blue tie. 

“À Bercy, on agit!” the newsletter informs me – Bercy gets things done. Thus, I am informed that if my car was set alight during the recent riots and I did not have the requisite level of insurance, I can be compensated by the personal order of Bruno Le Maire, the finance minister, and justice minister Éric Dupond Moretti. Terms and conditions apply. Payouts are capped at €4,601, subject, as I understand it, to the claimant having a taxable income not exceeding €27,606. 

And finally … “Have you thought about online platforms to plan your holidays?” If so, Le Bercy recommends that you compare prices shown on the various platforms and that you check any offers made against the price offered directly by the hotel. Punters are warned to beware of quotes that encourage them to decide too quickly. 

Quite so. 

I will end with a piece of information of my own, for which I am indebted to my friend and sometime colleague, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet. I had wondered why August (the month) is easily understood in German (August), Dutch (Augustus), Spanish and Italian (Agosto), but comes out as Aout (Oot) in French. As I should have guessed, our little friend, the circumflex, over the “u”, used to be there to indicate a missing letter, in this case the “g”, giving us (I think) Aogut. Yes, but why remove the “g” in the first place? Why not make it Auguste, like the name? And why did the Académie française remove the circumflex as part of a language reform ordinance in 2016? Who are these people and what was the point? Clearly, I still have a lot to learn. 

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The prime minister – currently Elisabeth Borne – takes instructions from Emmanuel Macron much as Alexei Kosygin, as chairman of both the Soviet Council of Ministers and the Committee on the Operational Management of the Economy, followed the orders of Leonid Brezhnev throughout the 1960s and ’70s. 

Mere ministers, with two exceptions, are apparachiks. They rarely become household names unless they are enmeshed in scandal, which, of course, happens from time to time. Last week, Macron carried out a practise reshuffle of his government in advance of an anticipated Day of the Long Knives that is expected to take place in the autumn. 

There were only two cabinet-level changes. The first saw the keen but callow historian Pap Ndiaye replaced as education minister by the 34-year-old one-time government spokesman Gabriel Attal, previously a member of the Socialist Party, now a confirmed Macronist. The second resulted in Aurélien Rousseau, a past adviser to two Socialist premiers, Manuel Valls and Bernard Cazeneuve, as well as to Elisabeth Borne, taking over as health minister from François Braun, a leading physician specialising in medical emergiences. 

Ndiaye, who is half Senegalese, is a respected academic, formerly a professor at Sciences Po (Cambridge to the Oxford of La Sorbonne), best known for his research into racism in France and America. It might be supposed that such a choice would be well-suited to the task of levelling up education at a time when thousands of young people of black and North African descent have been locked in combat with the police, having accused the state of abandoning their interests. Sadly for Ndiaye, the President was no longer convinced. What was actually needed, it turned out, was someone who knew everybody worth knowing across the political spectrum and was skilled in horse-trading. So it was out with Ndiaye and in with Attal. 

In the same way, the fall from favour of François Braun – appointed to the health portfolio only last June – can be explained by the President’s need to surround himself with people he can depend on to follow the true path. Braun, a brilliant and idealistic doctor, spent years campaigning for health sector reform. His successor, Aurélien Rousseau, is a former geography teacher, later a civil servant, most recently chief of staff to the prime minister. His long-time partner, Marguerite Cazeneuve, is both a key member of the President’s inner circle, advising him on health and pension reform, and the daughter of a leading Macronist MP, previously CEO of the Apple Corporation in France, central Europe, the Middle East and Africa. 

The cabinet changes did not exactly make headline news and are unlikely to shift the public view that Macron’s progress as President is not unlike walking up a downside escalator. Very few citizens would have been able to name any of the principles in this big-city yet small-town political drama. The only individuals most could put a face to would be the interior minister Gérald Darmanin, a right-winger charged by Macron with restoring order in the streets, no matter what, and Bruno Le Maire, the left-of-centre finance minister, who has kept the economy successfully afloat, if taking on water, for all of the last six turbulent years. 

Catherine Colonna, the foreign minister, was probably better known in the UK than France at the time of her appointment, having served as ambassador to London during the Brexit years when she made regular appearances on Radio 4’s Today Programme. Macron is effectively his own foreign minister, but no doubt relies on Colonna’s professionalism as he sets out each time to save Europe/Africa/the world. Of the remaining ministers – 16 in all, compared to 32 in the UK –  the only names that spring to mind are Éric Dupond-Moretti, the justice minister, and Sébastien Lecornu, minister for the armed forces. 

Dupond-Moretti is the only out and out maverick in the Cabinet. A theatrically endowed 62-year-old, he is a renowned criminal defence lawyer, dubbed l’Acquittator – a fusion of Acquitter and Matador – for his remarkable ability to secure courtroom victories for his clients. In 2019, his last full year at the bar before joining the Government, he won 145 not-guilty verdicts for those lucky enough to secure his services. His task today is to ensure equal justice for all, which frequently puts him at loggerheads with the police and the far right. 

“I am a free man,” he wrote in a memoir published in 2018. “I am proud of being a lawyer, of rejecting the Legion d’honneur and the Freemasonry, proud of saying whatever I want to say.” 

Not many of France’s nomenklatura could say the same. The norm is to accept any baubles offered and to look to a lucrative post-political career that takes into account their lofty rank as tribunes of the people. 

By contrast with Dupond-Moretti, Lecornu, now in charge of Europe’s largest armed forces, rose seamlessly from small town mayor, by way of the departmental council of Eure, to a succession of backroom jobs in government, notably as adviser to the disgraced former prime minister François Fillon. Lecornu was thrown out of the centre-right Republican Party after he defected to Macron’s En Marche movement in 2017. He was rewarded with a series of middle-ranking ministerial jobs and then, last May, aged 36, moved to the Hôtel de Brienne, official headquarters of the defence ministry, from which, in troubled times, he oversees an annual budget of forty-five billion euros.

Lecornu’s direct military experience is confined to the operational reserve of the Gendarmerie Nationale, of which, having up to that point been a lieutenant, he was made a colonel upon joining the government. 

Nominally presiding over all of this, Elisabeth Borne has been a beacon of stability. A no-nonsense middle-of-the roader, with a strong work ethic, she qualified as a civil engineer, but joined the élite civil service, rising to be prefect of the department of Vienne, where she came to the attention of Ségolène Royal (at the time the partner of François Hollande) who ran the associated region of Poitou-Charente. A political career ensued, both with Hollande and Macron, culminating in her appointment as prime minister two days after the latter’s re-election as President in May of last year. 

It is said that the former banker respects Borne and regards her as a safe pair of hands. As recently as last week, he publicly backed her as his chosen confidante, responsible for the latest iteration of his Soviet-style five-year plan. But like all French (and Russian) presidents, Macron periodically needs someone who is not him to pay the price of failure, and his affirmation of Borne was inevitably seen by many as a Judas kiss. As he works to refine his legacy over the remaining four years of his presidential term, opening the way to what he must hope will be an exciting, and suitably remunerated, third career, it could well be that Borne’s usefulness will come to a sudden end. If so, it is unlikely that she will bear any lasting ill-will. Ironically, Borne could be one of the last of her generation to retire at 62, not 64. 

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The house opposite ours, though ostensibly neo-Breton (the style most favoured by aspiring couples) is, you would have to say, a wreck, by which I do not mean a romantic ruin. It was built in the early 1960s but never lived in by its owner, who dossed down in the attic, reached by an external staircase, until he was taken away, aged 80-something, by men in white coats, at which point the anti-rodent squad moved in. 

Jean-Yves never married and claimed not to have any family. Certainly no one other than a wizened crone from the village ever visited him. But as frequently happens in rural France, his removal from the scene, even while still alive, prompted a property-based feeding frenzy. Relatives, no matter how distant, are said to have materialised from every corner of the country looking to somehow cash in. A gardener has started turning up charged with taming the surrounding wilderness, and a team of workmen spent a day the other week stripping out piles of old tiles and other unfitted fittings and de-lousing the various rooms with chemicals and an enormous industrial vacuum-cleaner.   

My wife tells me that the asking price is 65,000 euros, about £55,000, which would be less than half the market value in normal circumstances but is surely a bit steep given the undoubted cost of replastering the walls, replacing doors and windows, installing a new kitchen and bathroom, renewing the wiring and plumbing and, not least, fitting a new roof. 

When the house finally sells, I have no idea who will get the money. I can only speculate, basing my presumption on local gossip. The commune, or the department, may feel owed in part payment for the elderly owner’s residence in a care home. And you would think that Jean-Yves himself might get a share, even if he has no idea what to do with it. But then there is the “family” – second cousins twice removed and their progeny – who seem to have emerged out of the woodwork. Perhaps I am doing them a disservice. Maybe they just want to ensure that everything is done the right way, without thought of self. But then I remind myself, this is France. 

Speaking of renewals, our new front door, made of good old-fashioned oak, complete with frame, is scheduled to be installed next week, at a cost not far short of three-thousand euros. We ordered it last November, but for reasons I now forget (something to do with Covid), it never arrived. Louisa hates the drafts that blow through our hallway in winter, not unlike the Mistral. She says it will warm up the whole house during the coming months, but I’m not so sure. 

What we really need is proper central heating. The electric heaters we had put in seven years ago charge up overnight, but do little more than take the edge off the cold when the temperature outside falls below forty degrees. If we apply the booster during the day, the cost rockets, but if we don’t we end up swathed In jumpers. 

Next door, Jean-françois swears by his geo-thermal heat pump, installed by his cousin a couple of years back with much of the cost borne by the French state. But he had existing, old-style radiators to work with. We would have to get an entire new system installed. Besides, I have noticed that between November and March, Jean-françois is rarely to be seen not wearing a wooly cardigan. 

This just in. A potential buyer just turned up for the wreck opposite. He told Jean-françois he had looked at a house in Huelgoat – a touristy town about forty minutes from us ­– that he and his wife could just walk into for the merest €160,000. But he could see the potential of Jean-Yves’s place and would be looking into the likely cost of a thorough-going renovation. He likes it round our way apparently. We are, he says, sympa.  

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To Judt, the “real” history of modern-day Europe, beginning with the defeat of Hitler and the rise of the Stalinist imperium, centres on France and Germany, with Britain – his country of birth – accorded honourable mention. He gives short-shrift to the European Union, viewing its pretensions as ancillary to the narrative of competing nationalisms that, ironically and in spite of everything, have always provided the continent with a coherence – cultural, political and economic – greater than the sum of its parts. 

The same remains true today. You only have to look at the map to realise that France and Germany hold the keys to the enterprise – whatever the enterprise might be. Italy and Spain are bolted on to the south, linked to Greece and the Balkans by the expanse of the Mediterranean. The Benelux countries form a kind of Franco-German annex while the five Scandinavian nations look down on the rest of us from their perch adjoining the Arctic Circle. Britain – stand-offish as ever – holds fast to the west, both linked to and separated from the mainland by its 26-mile-wide moat. 

But look again at the map. Poland is huge, bound to its neighbours of the one-time Warsaw Pact as well as to the tenuously free Baltic states bordering an irredentist Russia. If Poland isn’t central to the story of Europe, then something strange is going on, rooted in the Soviet experiment that swallowed up once-proud states and, in effect, wiped them from the memory of generations living west of the Oder-Neisse line. 

Today, the East is back, asserting its existence not merely as an obvious fact of life but as one of Europe’s principal guarantors. As the tragedy of Ukraine continues to unfold, Russia refuses to go away. By any reasonable economic (or even demographic) measure, it is ridiculous that our continent, with its advanced economy and 500 million inhabitants should once more have to measure itself by its relationship with Russia, a vast, creaking and three-quarters-empty agglomeration simultaneously dirigiste and feudal. But, as our friends in America would no doubt remark, the situation is what it is and the US is no less a victim. 

The amount of blood and treasure being expended by the West on ensuring a future for Ukraine as an independent country is staggering, running into hundreds of billions of dollars/pounds/euros and Zlotys. Yet the outcome remains uncertain. Protected from the full force of Nato by its nuclear umbrella, Russia can do as it pleases, at least until it runs out of resources or – one would like to think – engages in a benign repeat of the October Revolution.

For the last thousand years or so, debate has continued over whether or not to include Russia as part of Europe. The phrase “European Russia” was devised to define the triangle bounded roughly by Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), Saint Petersburg (Leningrad) and Rostov-on-Don, with Moscow at its heart. But the rest of the country, with its more than one hundred minorities, 31 of them living in autonomous regions, goes on and on into the mist and snow until it finally disappears amid the ice floes and volcanoes of Kamchatka. 

Back in actual Europe, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and the Czech Republic are powering ahead and are predicted to surpass the UK in GDP per capita sometime in the next ten years. Bulgaria appears to be more stuck in its ways and will take longer to join the party. Hungary, meanwhile, remains something of an outlier, dominated by its populist prime minister Viktor Orban, who, while counting Vladimir Putin as a friend, hates the EU and everything it stands for but is happy to take all the money Brussels will throw at him. 

In normal times (if such a description means anything anymore), Poland’s place as the undoubted leader of the reconstituted East Bloc would have to overcome the scorn shown by Brussels in the face of its repressive government, dislike of a free press, opposition to Muslim immigration, anti-LGBT agenda, strict abortion laws and contempt for the judiciary. But all of the above have been trumped by the courage and determination displayed by Warsaw in the face of Russian aggression. President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki are now among the most influential leaders in Europe and, just as importantly, are well received in Washington. 

Such are the fortunes of war. 

Further west, beyond Austria and Switzerland (both keeping their heads down in the face of adversity), Europe’s outgoing inner-core of Germany, France and Italy are weathering a storm that shows no sign of abating. Not for them the fortunes of war. Instead, they pay the bills. 

Germany, which for decades was viewed as the sheet anchor of the EU economy, holding everything in place, has ended up marooned in the past. Judt (who died in 2010) points out that the source of the former Reich’s postwar prosperity (other than Marshall Aid) was its adherence to the economic recovery plan devised by the Nazis in the 1930s, based on communications, armaments, optics, chemicals, light engineering and, above all, vehicle production. The social market economy of Ludwig Erhard in the 1950s and ’60s had its roots, he tells us, in the policies of Albert Speer, pursued, free from SS direction, all the way from 1948 to the financial crash of 2008. 

Germany’s weakness, which has only become apparent in recent years, has been its unwillingness to move with the times, so that its once-dominant auto industry, on which so many people’s livelihoods depend, has ended up in the doldrums. Things change and Worsprung durch Technik is not what it was. In parallel with this, the country’s place in the world of IT and screen-based start-ups is well to the back of the queue. Industries that have earned steady profits for the last 70 years are having to reassess what they do for the first time since Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Only a fool would bet against their succeeding, but retooling an entire economy will take time as well as money.  

In France, there has been greater flexibility. Emmanuel Macron is often seen as a failed president because of the social upheaval that has accompanied his attempts at social reform. But on the quiet he has overseen an effective update of the French economy, injecting state subsidies where permitted (and sometimes where not) and encouraging both startups and the growth of Paris as a global financial centre. He hasn’t worked miracles, but unemployment is down and growth has been maintained. National infrastructure, including rail and roads, has been boosted and the speed of the move to energy independence, based on both nuclear power and sustainables, has been impressive. 

It could be that Macron will be followed into the Élysée in 2027 by none other than Marine Le Pen, at the head of the National Rally (formerly the National Front), but should that be the case the chances of a violent lurch to the right are felt to be slim. 

Italy, similarly, is not the basket case that the media likes to pretend. Italian manufacturing is on the upswing and growth this year, at 1.2 per cent, is expected to top the European average. Giorgia Meloni, the new populist prime minister may not know much about economics, banking or industry, but she knows how to charm and butter up her fellow leaders and looks to be canny enough not to do anything daft. 

Spain is a bit lost right now, unable to decide the best way forward. But, as last Sunday’s elections showed, it is not quite ready to take to the streets. It just wants all sections of society to be listened to and for the country to pull together – no easy task. But the economy looks to be sound. Immediately post-Covid, growth in Spain was running at 5 per cent. This year and next, with lockdowns lost in the rear mirror, that lightning pace is projected to fall to more like 2 per cent. Who in the UK, or Germany, wouldn’t take that? 

Portugal, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, little Luxembourg and the Scandis are all chundering along, with Norway, the ultimate green energy hypocrite, plausibly on course to claim the title of World’s Richest Country. 

And then, of course, there’s Britain, “of Europe but not in it,” or possibly the other way round. Britain, post-Brexit, has seriously lost its way and accumulated a mass of problems. But we have been here before and the likelihood is that by 2030, or thereabouts, we will have come out the other side and begun once more to prosper. Whether we will be richer and more influential as an independent country than as one of the EU’s most important member states is debatable. We are not currently regarded as a close friend of the family, more as the uncle at your niece’s wedding whose demeanour and decorum after a few drinks cannot be assured. But with the rise again of the nation state within the EU, the chance is there to insert ourselves once more into places which once seemed ours by right. We should seize it. 

Put all this together and Europe ceases to resemble a patient etherised upon a table. There are serious issues to be resolved, not least the impact of climate change and the drive towards sustainable energy. Mass-immigration cannot be wished away or dispatched to Rwanda. It is not just the followers of Meloni and Le Pen and the citizens of Poland and Hungary who fret about what are too often depicted as the “migrant hordes”. Germans are equally concerned, as are the Spanish, Dutch, Belgians, Austrians, Swedes and Danes –­ even the Irish – to say nothing of the Swiss, whose Alpine heights have long since been bypassed. 

But neither forest fires nor illegal arrivals by sea are confined to the nations of Europe. The twin phenomena are universal and require universal solutions. 

It may have struck the reader that in this analysis of the continent we call home I have, like Judt, paid scant attention to the role of the European Union, most obviously the European Commission. This is because the EU is, in my reading, going through a much-needed period of re-evaluation. Events in recent years have shown that national governments look to themselves first and foremost when the chips are down. Brussels has proved itself a useful co-ordinator and facilitator, as during the financial crash and the pandemic. It plays an important part in promoting action on climate change. But its role in the Ukraine crisis has been marginal at best. It was Nato that stood up to Putin, not the Commission. It was to America, and to a degree Britain, that Europe turned instinctively when the skies darkened over Ukraine. The memory of that will last for years into the future. 

What comes next in terms of EU institutional development is unclear. Macron says he wants “more Europe,” with himself, one imagines, as the putative number one giver. Germany’s Olaf Scholz may even go along with this, though not without looking over his shoulder. But Meloni and Le Pen are not alone in wanting less. Martin Amis once observed of the interminable prose of Don Quixote that there is no such thing in Cervantes as “next,” just “more”, which is the trap into which the EU could too easily fall. It is not inconceivable that a consensus will emerge in which the Single Market and the Customs Union, and all that go along with these, including tight market regulation and the Single Currency, should be the high watermark of “Europe,” with close cooperation in foreign affairs and the environment as a bonus. Who knows? 

In conclusion, Europe is not “done”. It is not finished. It is not ready to accept museum status. America may be rushing ahead, powered by oil and gas and its astonishing ability to think big and act fast. China may be obsessed with overtaking it to become World Number One. India, East Asia and Africa are experiencing massive growth that will surely transform their status in the century ahead. But do not discount the Old Continent, Britain included – a family like no other. For the best is yet to come. 

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Don, our host, is Irish, albeit via Reading, and affects to have little interest in cricket – though he did, oddly, know the exact score when an Ireland eleven took their country’s one-time colonial masters to the cleaners in a one-day international in 2020. 

The French, it is safe to say, haven’t a clue about cricket, which they consider an eccentric pastime restricted to the English-speaking (or as they would put it, Anglo-Saxon) world. Instead, they are transfixed by the Tour de France, which ends this Sunday in Paris after two gruelling weeks on the road. 

I make no prediction concerning the outcome. The fact is, I know even less about cycling than Don knows about cricket. What I can say is that the French don’t appear to be very good at it. As things stand, after Stage 18 of 21, the only French riders of consequence this year are David Gaudu, in tenth place overall, and (hold on …) Christoph Laporte, who finished ninth yesterday in a 189-kilometre dash from Moutiers to Bourg-en-Bresse, in the Auvergne, north east of Lyon. 

By contrast, there are two Englishmen in the top ten, Adam Yates and his twin-brother, Simon, from that globally-renowned cycling hotbed, Bury. Three British riders, Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas, have won the Tour five times between them since 2012, and the co-holder of the record for most sprint victories is Mark Cavendish, from the Isle of Man, who was prevented from taking the title outright this year when he ended up seriously hurt after a pile-up back during stage eight. 

The last time a Frenchman won the Tour was in 1985, long before any of the current crop of riders were even born, when Bernard Hinault, from Yffiniac, less than an hour’s drive from our home in Brittany, achieved victory for the fifth time. This year, with the final stage coming up on Sunday, the race looks to be between Jonas Vingegaard, from Denmark, and the Slovenian Tadej Pogacar. The poor old French are nowhere. 

But this is strange, is it not? The French are probably the world’s keenest cyclists. Young and old alike, they infest the country’s roads throughout the summer months, dressed in spandex, forcing drivers to give them a wide berth (which they do) as they put in a quick 50 kms before lunch. 

Callac, our local market town, used to be a big noise in the cycling world. The Critérium de Callac was a famous event in the calendar for 54 years, right up until 1999 when it was unceremoniously dropped.  A subsequent event, named after local hero Pierre le Bigaut, which raised money to help find a cure for cystic fibrosis, was staged for the last time this month, after 31 years, having apparently run short of stewards. 

But if French dominance of the sport has faded into history, the Tour remains a dominant fixture of French television, which follows the race over two weeks, eight hours a day, tracking every turn of the wheel and every misadventure as the Peleton carves its way through France, its progress measured not just by the minute, but by the nanosecond. 

For the uninitiated, it is a pretty dull affair, only enlivened on TV by commentators who, when not breathless in considering the exertions of the teams and their chosen leaders, are frequently consumed by emotion over the beauty and grandeur of their homeland. In this sense, if in no other, the coverage resembles Test Match Special, whose old lags are wont to observe the timeless Englishness of Lords, Old Trafford or Headingley and who, at “tea,” issue thanks to those listeners kind enough to have sent them cake. 

The only time I watched the Tour live, as it were, was when “Wiggy” came tearing down the hill outside our house on his way to Guingamp. He was come and gone in less than ten seconds and I never actually laid eyes on him. But to my neighbour, it was a historic moment. If only Wiggins had been French!  

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