I CAN’T have been the only one agog at the BBC footage of the French finally pulling out le finger last week.
As a heaving dinghy of fighting-age men attempted to launch from the shallows of Northern France, a stacked Gendarme sprung across the foreshore and slashed the flimsy craft with a big knife.
Shutterstock EditorialFrance’s President Emmanuel Macron during a State Banquet at Windsor Castle[/caption]
Macron with King Charles at Windsor Castle todayReuters
BBCThe French finally popped a dinghy for the cameras — but we were played, again[/caption]
Gone were the Gallic shrugs and folded arms. Au revoir the infuriating image of cops looking on as criminal smugglers loaded up flimsy craft with client after client and all but waved them off to Britain.
Instead, the craft fizzled out like years of Froggy excuses about not having the power to enter the water to stop the boats.
“By, Georges, they’ve finally got it,” I thought. If they can puncture one, they can puncture them all.
And all happening, miraculously, just days before the King rolled out the red carpet for France’s diminutive President Emmanuel Macron.
Had Sir Keir Starmer’s fabled “Brexit reset” with the continent actually begun to bear fruit?
Smirking half-pint
Was the PM’s great betrayal of our fishing waters to French trawlers for years to come actually undoing years of French obstinance and punishment beatings for daring to quit their beloved EU?
I should have believed it was too good to be true, as the only thing to sink since then was this short-lived PR stunt for the cameras.
The French have yet to make a regular occurrence of this no-brainer tactic.
They have made it very clear by stopping just one in five migrants making our waters in a recent week.
Instead of getting wet bottoms on a Calais beach after their boats were popped, 703 illegal migrants arrived for bed and board in Britain in the last week of June.
The French stopped just 191, despite us paying them to literally do their jobs.
Three years since the UK got its chequebook out to the tune of £480million to grease Paris to help stop the crossings, it finally looked like some progress was being made.
It turns out we were all played, again.
So I can’t have been the only one agog again yesterday at the BBC’s fawning coverage of President Macron arriving, all waves and smiles at Windsor Castle.
GettyMacron’s bid to fob us off with the Bayeux Tapestry rather than stop boats shows his true colours[/caption]
And I can’t have been the only Brit whose blood boiled as the smirking half-pint was afforded the highest honour Parliament can bestow with an invitation to address both the Lords and the Commons.
Even Germany’s Angela Merkel finally cracked in the end and told the EU Commission to do a Brexit trade deal with Boris Johnson
(At least the Peers had the good sense to erect a tiny podium for the President in front of an absolutely enormous painting of the Battle of Waterloo — 210 years after the last time a little fella from across the Channel gave us grief.)
And all before King Charles — who bizarrely claimed on Monday that there was “no border” between Britain and France — later treated the Macrons to everything French leaders wish they still had, with a Royal bells-and-whistles banquet.
Which left many asking, why?
No so-called ally or friendly nation has done more to try to hurt Britain in the last decade than Macron’s government.
Even Germany’s Angela Merkel finally cracked in the end and told the EU Commission to do a Brexit trade deal with Boris Johnson.
All the while the French held out and pushed for more and more concessions from the UK, geeing on the Irish Republic to play politics with the border with Northern Ireland in a way Paris would never ever countenance anyone doing so with one of their countless outposts.
Macron even had the “Gaul” to claim he and Starmer were leading a “concrete, effective, and lasting” partnership, having spent the last decade turning the screw.
Why would Macron be so concerned about stopping Rwanda if he really wanted to help stop illegal crossings in the Channel?
Now we learn our PM capitulated to Paris’s demands that he drop the Rwanda scheme, on the cusp of “wheels up” as the price for any new chapter in Anglo-French relations.
A shoddy revelation that says as much about our own government’s priorities upon taking power as it does about our conniving “friend”.
Why would Macron be so concerned about stopping Rwanda if he really wanted to help stop illegal crossings in the Channel?
And perhaps he is hoping we will all just forget that his late-night ambush for more fishing rights nearly upended Starmer’s new deal with the EU earlier this year.
More elbow grease
Fool us once, shame on you . . . Fool us twice . . .
And what do we get in return?
The jury is out on whether France will agree to a “one in, one out” scheme that would see us send illegal boat crossers back, only to have to take a migrant with links to Britain from France in return.
Only the most optimistic or naive would think such a scheme could be operated on a large enough scale to act as a suitable deterrent or break the smugglers’ business model.
But hey, at least we can borrow the Bayeux Tapestry — an offer first made by Macron to Theresa May in 2018 and now repeated yesterday.
Given most historians agree the epic blanket was stitched in England 950 years ago, it is about time it came home.
While it would be nice to see our handiwork, I suspect the British public would like a bit more than needlework, and a bit more elbow grease on the beaches.
AFPEven Germany’s Angela Merkel finally cracked in the end and told the EU Commission to do a Brexit trade deal with Boris Johnson[/caption] Published: [#item_custom_pubDate]
