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After many years of political meltdown on our island, it has been satisfying these past few weeks to regain the one feeling that really puts a spring in every Englishman’s step. Because, while it’s of course important that our vaccine programme has saved thousands of lives so far, the most special thing is that for the first time in many years France’s politics are much worse than ours. Order is restored to the galaxy once again.
France’s president has shredded his reputation more than any other person in the age of Covid (and with some competition). First Emmanuel Macron cast doubt on the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine, calling it “almost ineffective” for the over-65s, the sort of reckless comment even Trump might have thought a bit excessive. Then, thanks to his lockdown policies, the Economist downgraded France to a “flawed democracy”, along with all the Visegrad bad boys and Modi’s India.
Now the country has, inexplicably, halted AZ vaccinations because of a miniscule number of blood clots, fewer than you would get with the contraceptive pill. But then perhaps it hardly matters, since France leads the world in vaccine scepticism, and conspiracy theories more generally. It is a country maddening in its strangeness, and that at least partly explains English antipathy to the place, which goes back centuries.
When Britain left the EU last year it followed decades of press hostility in which Francophobia was the strongest component, far more than hostility to the Germans. Perhaps the most famous example was the notorious Sun headline from November 1990, Up Yours, Delors. At the time EU commissioner Jacques Delors had become something of a bogey figure to the British Right, and after he had criticised Britain’s increasingly isolated position in Europe, the Sun chimed in by pointing out how “They tried to conquer Europe until we put down Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815” and “They gave in to the Nazis during the Second world War when we stood firm”. It called for all “frog-haters” to shout “up yours, Delors!” and that those on the south coast would be able to smell the garlic from across the Channel.
(Delors was not the only French politician to antagonise the English at the time. The following year, prime minister Edith Cresson stated her belief that one-quarter of “Anglo-Saxon men” were gay, to which Tory MP Tony Marlow replied “Mrs. Cresson has sought to insult the virility of the British male because the last time she was in London she did not get enough admiring glances”. Afterwards, the tabloids pointed out that Frenchmen kiss each other and carry handbags.)
Of course, the Sun might not speak for England, but it was probably speaking for a large section of its readers, because while England’s relationship with France is complicated, it is heavily tied up with our class system; the English middle class obsess over France, while the English working class have traditionally hated everything about it.
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