Rishi Sunak has one job when he meets Emmanuel Macron: soften the Brexit deal ✍️ DenisMacShane for ipaperviews
Rishi Sunak will attend a bi-lateral meeting with Emmanuel Macron on 10 March
At long last, diplomacy is breaking out. Following the Brexit years, no one in government circles could find a good word to say about the French, but Rishi Sunak has announced that he will be attending a major bilateral meeting with President Emmanuel Macron on 10 March.. The latter is unlikely to be the entente cordiale ice-breaker of his great great grandfather, Edward VII .
France may not have the economic clout of Germany but it is nonetheless a global player with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a good relationship with Joe Biden, a military twice the size of Britain’s shrunken army, and a stronger presence in Latin America, Saharan Africa, and the east Mediterranean. Paris has more power in Brussels than any other EU member state.
That is why, despite historical differences and national outlooks, British post-war leaders have paid serious attention to them. Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair all invested serious time in working the French account. The first leader to call Thatcher when the antisemitic army junta in Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1982 was François Mitterrand, promising solidarity and to send secrets of the Exocet missiles France had sold Buenos Aires.
I attended all the summits between former president Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair. Chirac was puzzled when he was pestered by Westminster lobby correspondents after a routine news conference about Labour’s fox-hunting ban, then a big story in England. He just looked bemused that this was of the slightest importance or why he should have a view.
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