In Paris and London Political Mistakes Multiply as Political Leaders Sans Experience Are At The Helm

The last French prime minister to lose a vote of no confidence in France’s National Assembly was Georges Pompidou in 1962. Eight years later he was President of France. That may be some comfort to Michel Barnier who will be 76 at the time of the next presidential election in France – younger than the last two Presidents of America.

Barnier who calls himself a “social Gaullist” and fell out with Jacques Chirac 35 years ago by voting for a pro-European policy advanced by the socialist president François Mitterrand against the opportunistic Euroscepticism of his party leader, Jacques Chirac, keeps fits by walking and skiing in his native Alpine Savoy region.

Unlike Macron who was a Rothschild banker when the newly elected Socialist president of France François Hollande made him a young technocratic finance minister in 2012, Barnier has decades of parliamentary and party political experience under his belt and his political career may not be over.

He knew he was on mission impossible to produce a government programme and budget that stood the faintest chance of winning parliamentary approval. Caesar wrote that Gaul (France) was divided into three parts. Today the National Assembly is divided into 3 groups of similar size so no normal majority exists.

This is entirely Macron’s fault. He has never been elected to be a commune-level councillor let alone parliament. He has only stood in two elections – both against an opponent easy to beat – Marine Le Pen. She like her racist, anti-semitic father has spent too much of her life promoting sulphurous hate politics of the populist nationalist right.

Now she is desperate to oust Macron before a court judgement in March which is likely to declare her ineligible to hold public office after her party’s massive fiddling of European Parliament expenses to pay for national party organisation in France.

So she forged an alliance against nature with the far-left demagogue Jean-Luc Mélenchon a guest of honour at the Labour Party conference with his fellow leftist, Jeremy Corbyn.

This Black-Red alliance meant it was impossible for Barnier to win a vote for his budget and off he went. Another PM will be found but ever since Macron stabbed his mentor François Hollande in the back by running against him to be president in 2017 he has shown that winning plaudits from fellow-members of the Davos Global Elite is no guarantee of running a major democracy with flair and good judgement.

Very early after entering the Elysée after an easy win against Marine Le Pen – think Sir Keir Starmer’s win over the unelectable Sunak-Truss Tory PMs – Macron decided he would increase government revenue by hiking tax on diesel fuel.

That made sense to the bike-riding Parisian fonctionnaires and Le Monde columnists. But he did not notice that Marine Le Pen’s support was in precise ratio to the distance voters lived from a railway station.

Provincial France, the equivalent of red wall Northern England, needed their cars, vans, and lorries to get to work in the 27/7 service economy of care homes, out-of-town supermarkets or make deliveries to building sites or small shops.

A politician who had fought and lost elections before getting a top post would have paused before making minimum wage France pay more just to move around. The gilets jaunes (yellow vest) explosion of anger of workers, farmers, shopkeepers, pensioners in the deep France Macron had never campaigned in did huge damage to Macron’s political standing at the beginning of his presidency.

It was perhaps analogous to Britain where a Prime Minister who had only began doing politics in his 50s and entered Downing Street aged 62 also made unforced errors like removing from pensioners a modest heating allowance in winter the old had come to rely on, accepting together with his senior ministers free gifts of expensive clothes and luxury apartment accommodation from a Labour donor, or altering a death tax on asset-rich but income poor farmers that a politician who had been knocking on doors and asking for votes since his or her 20s would have avoided.

To be fair, the UK seems to have no successful politicians in the manner of a Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher in recent years. Angela Merkel has just brought out her memoirs but critics are now highlighting her endless mistakes from making Germany completely dependent on Putin’s gas and oil to letting in 1 million Syrian immigrants while expecting poorer EU member states in east Europe to take a share. She made uncontrolled immigration the factor that has given a huge boost to nationalist populist politics including helping the anti-Europeans to win the Brexit vote in Britain.

The populist anti-EU left has also helped weaken and remove older socialist and social democratic governments in France, Greece, Austria, Nordic states and in Britain Corbyn populist leftism kept Brexit Tory prime ministers in power for a decade after 2015.

For all its political turmoil France remains strong with much better productivity than a UK that has decided to make trade as difficult as possible with Europe despite Britain trading twice as much with the EU as with the US. Paris has eight equivalents of the Elizabeth Line and hi-speed TGV trains crossing France north-south, east-west while Britain began its second hi-speed train line eight years ago and it still doesn’t connect any two cities.

Five years ago Macron watched as Notre Dame, the most important cathedral in Europe, was burnt down. France has rebuilt it in just five years while 21^st century Britain has no major building project to its name.

President Trump made his first visit to Europe this weekend. He did not come to see Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage but instead President Macron as the real special relationship for the US is with the nation that helped liberate the republic from British imperialism.

Macron put Trump and the Ukrainian leader Zelensky together just as Putin was facing humiliation in Syria with his client Bashar-al Assad fleeing his palaces a fate that may yet befall Putin. (Fingers crossed)

While the elite commentators and politicians of London were enjoying Macron’s discomfiture the French president who still controls the levers of state power including foreign relation, diplomacy and defence police has pulled of a diplomatic coup bring Trump to Europe.

But Macron proves the point that doing domestic politics well requires a long training, and bags of experience. He is not at heart a good professional politician. But are ours any better?

Denis MacShane first stood for parliament in 1974. He was an MP for 18 years and served for eight years in the FCO under Tony Blair