Deciders meet deliverers

On 4 April 2013 David Cameron was “winched from a helicopter onto HMS Victorious, one of our Trident nuclear submarines” to quote from his own account later that day. According to a local newspaper, the Lennox Herald:

Mr Cameron joined the submarine at sea as it finished an 88-day mission and spent time with crew members on board the giant strategic missile submarine and visited the vessel’s operations room, messes and living spaces.

Photographs of Cameron on board HMS Victorious at the end of the 100th Trident patrol appeared in the national press the following day (see above).

Then on 8 April the death of Lady Thatcher started a flood of media articles in the days before the funeral on 17 April. One was by Angela Huth in the Daily Mail on 11 April:

Back in 1986, a producer friend at the BBC suggested that a book I had written, The English Woman’s Wardrobe, would make a good documentary film. The book was not about fashion, but about women’s feelings about their clothes. Princess Margaret was the star of the printed version: we wanted Mrs Thatcher to take that role in the film. Amazingly, she agreed.

At Number 10 the PM

… led us into the sitting room. There, some 20 different garments were hanging before us on a long clothes rack. She had abandoned her lunch break to heave them from her bedroom into the sitting room. … Mrs Thatcher remembered the history of everything on the rack, and described each one with merry recall. She pointed to a severe beige suit. ‘This we wore on a visit to the Polaris missile,’ she explained, with a touch of nostalgia. The ‘we’ she referred to meant, I think, she and her dressmaker.

The beige suit is probably the garment fourth from the right below.

A clue to “Polaris missile” can be found on the Margaret Thatcher Foundation’s (MTF) excellent website, which has recently made available her private files for 1982:

On 31 July MT paid a visit to HMS Resolution, one of the four Polaris submarines carrying Britain's strategic nuclear deterrent, a visit held so secret in advance that her appointment diary was left blank for the day: we only have timings for it because she kept the tiny engagement card she received each morning detailing the appointments for the day ahead. (Generally those cards do not survive.) Admiral Fieldhouse accompanied her and afterwards she wrote to him (10 Aug):  

It was a marvellous experience - made wonderful by the superlative and yet modest qualities of the commander and crew. The feeling of comradeship and yet discipline and respect were marvellous to see. We are fortunate indeed in the high personal qualities of our ordinary folk - if ordinary is the word to use: they all seem so able to demonstrate extraordinary qualities when called upon to do so. …

A couple of aspects of this seem noteworthy. Firstly, the somewhat de haut en bas reference in 1984 to “ordinary folk”, although qualified, and the use of a regal “we” to Huth in 1986 suggest that Mrs Thatcher’s feet had lost contact with the ground earlier than indicated by some of the accounts of her despatch in 1990 by her exasperated colleagues. The well-known “We have become a grandmother” was in 1989. Secondly, and more interestingly, it raises the question of how many other Prime Ministers have taken the trouble to visit Polaris or Trident submarines. Why should they? Peter Hennessy devotes a whole chapter of The Secret State Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010 to “The Human Button: Deciders and Deliverers” and makes the point:

… the premier [with the Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS)] makes up the first of the pairs that comprise the firing chain from the prime ministerial bunker to the Royal Navy Trident submarine on patrol. (page 358)

The Royal Navy became “Deliverers” at the start of the first Polaris patrol in 1968 since when there have been eight “Decider” Prime Ministers, four Conservative and four Labour. Of the Conservatives we know for certain that Cameron and Thatcher have been on board HM submarines carrying the nuclear deterrent. John Major may have been – he visited the Faslane base in August 1996 and made a speech at the ceremony to mark the decommissioning of the last Polaris submarine, HMS Repulse, by which time the first two Trident submarines were operational. Whether Ted Heath made such a visit in the Polaris period between 1970 and 1974 is uncertain. Margaret Thatcher was Heath’s education secretary so the MTF is making papers from his government available on-line. One is a record of a conversation between Heath and President Pompidou in November 1973 indicating the former’s interest in future nuclear cooperation with France rather than the US (page 8/9). So perhaps not.

Again, it is yet to be established whether or not any of the four Labour PMs (Wilson, Callaghan, Blair and Brown) visited a Polaris or, in the case of the latter two, Trident submarine. Of course, not doing so, or not wanting it to be publicised if they did, does not mean that they failed to take their Decider responsibilities seriously. Hennessy records Lord Guthrie’s comment on his briefing when CDS of Tony Blair as to the Trident force and its capability:

He was quite quiet when he actually heard what was at the country’s disposal. (page 310)

In France, a country which embraces égalité (but is run by élites) and where a Socialist President is unencumbered by a left wing with unilateralist tendencies, the Decider can go to sea early on in his time in office to mix with les gens ordinaires who are ready to do the delivering (François Hollande on Le Terrible in July 2012, below).

UPDATE JULY 2017

Well, don't the years go by! Another French president made a visit to the same submarine (as reported by BBC News, Emmanuel Macron aboard France's Le Terrible nuclear submarine) on 4 July apparently.

Will Theresa May follow in her predecessor's footsteps?  Too much else going on one would have thought.

Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Submission’

Before you read any further, I humbly suggest that if you are searching for enlightenment about Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Submission (Soumission), you might well spend your time better with, just for example, Adam Gopnik’s The Next Thing in the New Yorker, or Marco Roth’s Among the Believers in Harper’s Magazine, or Adam Shatz’s Colombey-les-deux-Mosquées in the London Review of Books. Not to mention the series of five interviews Houellebecq gave to Le Figaro magazine in the summer of 2015. But if you’re prepared to go on, perhaps some of the links may prove useful, if little else … 

(Page x refers to the UK edition above left, page y to the French above right) 

Michel Houellebecq’s five-part novel, Submission (Soumission), is set in France, mostly in Paris, in 2022 and 2023 during the months of the presidential election campaign and its aftermath. In Part I we learn that the narrator, François, is a professor of literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, whose speciality from his doctorate onwards has been the work of the fin de siècle French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. François is in his early 40s, unmarried after numerous successive affairs with his students, and is unhappy with his situation and his prospects, although he feels that his academic articles about Huysman are “clear, incisive and brilliant” (Page 37).

In Part II the approaching election begins to concern François. The first round is on Sunday, 15 May – the format used for successive chapter titles from then until the end of the month. Although “as political as a bath towel” (Page 39), François is well aware that after the Socialist François Hollande had been re-elected in 2017, the political scene in France had begun to change. An Islamic party, the Muslim Brotherhood, under a charismatic leader, Ben Abbes, a graduate of the École Polytechnique and the École Nationale d’Administration (Page 88), has become increasingly popular. François learns more about what might happen during conversations with Lempereur, a young academic with right-wing connections, and with Alain Tanneur, the husband of another colleague, who works for the DGSI, similar to the UK’s Security Service. After encountering an ugly scene on the streets of Paris, François decides that “it would be prudent to come up with an evacuation plan, in case things took a sudden turn for the worse” (Page 58) and opens an account with an English bank in Paris. His most recent girlfriend, Myriam, who is Jewish and in love with him, as he recognises (Page 83), decides that she should leave for Israel with her family.

Part III opens on Sunday, 29 May with the second round of the election and François up early and taking the A10 autoroute, at first intending to head to the south west but then deciding Spain would be better. Running low on fuel he turns off at a service station to find the pumps turned off and the bodies of the cashier and two young banlieu types. He decides to leave the A10 and head for Martel in the Lot department, where he stays until the middle of July. The second round of the election is cancelled after attacks on polling stations and a third round is to be held a week later. François has another long conversation with Tanneur, who comes from Martel, and, having been compelled to leave the DGSI, is about to retire there. Ben Abbes, backed by the centre right and the Socialists, wins by a landslide. François makes repeated visits to the Chapel of Our Lady at nearby Rocamadour but fails to make the connection with religion that Huysman had achieved.

At the start of Part IV, François has returned to Paris. Far from close to his long-separated parents, he discovers that his mother has died. Soon afterwards he learns that he is to be pensioned off* by what has become the Islamic University of Paris-Sorbonne. Then he hears that his father has died. Isolated and with no role, by early 2023 François has become very depressed. He decides to return to the abbey near Poitiers where Huysman had taken his monastic vows and which François had visited when preparing his dissertation. After three days he leaves.

Part V begins with François on the TGV back to Paris, observing with interest one of his fellow passengers, an Arab with two of his wives. On returning home he finds a letter inviting him to edit Huysman’s work for the prestigious Éditions de Pléiade. Things look up further for François when he is invited to a reception for the reopening of the Sorbonne. He meets Robert Rediger, its new president. Rediger invites François to his splendid house and proposes that he rejoin the faculty on the basis that he is neither Catholic nor atheist and prepared to convert. François takes away a copy of Rediger’s middle-brow best-seller, Ten Questions on Islam, and “Like most men, probably, I skipped the chapters on religious duties, the pillars of wisdom and child-rearing, and went straight to chapter seven: ‘Why Polygamy?’ (Page 224). By the end of the book, François has become a Muslim and takes “the chance at a second life, with very little connection to the old one. I would have nothing to mourn.” (Page 250).

François is a sharp observer with a mordant view of life, (doubtless not dissimilar to Houellebecqq’s – after all, we are warned that Huysmans uses

… a tried and true strategy: he adopts a main character, an authorial stand-in … (Page 38) )

and we are exposed to it early on when Francois, having defined literature as … the major art form of a Western civilisation now ending before our very eyes (Page 6),  soon after explains that:

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature - it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 per cent of the time. Still, it's harmless, and can even have a certain marginal value. A young woman applying for a sales job at Céline or Hermès should naturally attend to her appearance above all; but a degree in literature can constitute a secondary asset, since it guarantees the employer, in the absence of any useful skills, a certain intellectual agility that could lead to professional development - besides which, literature has always carried positive connotations in the world of luxury goods. (Page 10)

François’ views about teaching and women are similarly acerbic and in Part II, he moves on to politics:

History is full of such blindness [to the significance of violence and riots]: we see it among the intellectuals, politicians and journalists of the 1930s, all of whom were convinced that Hitler would ‘come to see reason’. It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay. (Page 44)

For all his knowingness, François can be surprisingly gauche (in its English usage), for example when he first meets Lempereur:

Alice watched us with the affectionate, slightly mocking look that women get when they witness a conversation between two men – that odd ritual, that is neither buggery or a duel, but something inbetween. (Page 46) 

… As an intellectual of the right, I was thinking, he was seductive enough. He’d stand out in the department, in a minor way. You can let people talk for a long time, they’re always interested in what they have to say, but every now and then you’re supposed to contribute. … ‘You’re what,’ I asked, ‘Catholic? Fascist? A little of both?’ It just popped out. I was out of practice with intellectuals of the right – I couldn’t remember how to behave. All at once in the distance we heard a kind of sustained crackling. (Page47/48)

He likes to disguise his misogynistic views in a cloak of realism:

… I benefited from that basic inequality between men, whose erotic potential diminishes very slowly as they age, and women, for whom the collapse comes with shocking brutality from year to year, or even from month to month. (Page 15) 

… I thought about Annelise's life - and the life of every Western woman. In the morning she probably blow-dried her hair, then she thought about what to wear, as befitted her professional status, whether 'stylish' or 'sexy', most likely 'stylish' in her case. Either way, it was a complex calculation, and it must have taken her a while to get ready before dropping the kids off at day care , then she spent the day e-mailing, on the phone, in various meetings, and once she got home, around nine, exhausted (Bruno was the one who picked the kids up, who made them dinner - he had the hours of a civil servant), she'd collapse, get into a sweatshirt and tracksuit trousers, and that's how she'd greet her lord and master, and some part of him must have known - had to have known - that he was fucked, and some part of her must have known that she was fucked, and that things wouldn't get better over the years. The children would get bigger, the demands at work would increase, as if automatically, not to mention the sagging of the flesh. (Page 76)

Certainly Houellebecq’s male characters are more interesting than the female ones, Tanneur particularly, although the reader is left wondering what happened to the smooth young Lempereur. Rediger, who is rising fast under the new regime, gives François his card:

In the metro I examined the business card that my new acquaintance had given me. It was elegant and tasteful, at least I thought so. Rediger provided his personal phone number, two office numbers, two fax numbers (one personal, one office), three email addresses, ill-defined, two mobile numbers (one French, the other British) and a Skype handle. This was a man who let you know how to get in touch (Page 201)

Although the book is set in the near future it is firmly rooted in the present, notwithstanding the author’s reference to “these inventions of mine” in the Acknowledgements (Page 251). Not just Sarkozy, Hollande, the Le Pens and Copé, but many of the other public personalities mentioned, less well-known outside France, can be found on Wikipédia, for example Pujadas, Barbier, Dély, Thréard, Mégret, (Laurent) Wauquiez, (Renaud) Camus and (Florian) Phillipot. Whether this is a weakness or strength is difficult to say except that, within less than a year, the premises of Submission seem to have been overtaken by more events than might have been expected so soon. The Soumission publication day (7 January 2015) was, of course, that of the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The cover of that day’s issue was a caricature of Houellebecq as a wizard making predictions. The long-term consequences of those events remain to be seen but they seem unlikely to strengthen the novel’s key proposition (which is anyway dependent on a personality like that of Ben Abbes having emerged to shape the necessary policies) that after the election of 2017:

In a country gripped by ever more widespread unemployment, the strategy broadened the Brotherhood’s reach far beyond the reach of strictly observant Muslims. Its rise was nothing short of meteoric. After less than five years it was polling [in 2022] just behind the Socialists: at 21 versus 23 per cent. (Page 41)

2015 has also seen the EU having to deal with the migrant crisis and people arriving from Syria and elsewhere. Marine Le Pen seems unlikely now to make this particular mistake:

During the 2017 campaign, the National Front candidate had been persuaded that a woman had to look like Angela Merkel to win the presidency, and she did all she could to match the bristling respectability of the German chancellor, right down to copying the cut of her suits. (Page 89)

And then there are the minor discrepancies, unavoidable with the passage of time, like the UMP changing its name to Les Républicains and the damage to Volkswagen’s reputation from the diesel emission scandal. Fortunately François’ Touareg has a petrol engine (Page 104), unlike the Audi eulogised by its owner in The Map and the Territory.

Everything quoted so far is from Submission, as translated from Soumission by the editor of the New York-based Paris Review, Lorin Stein. Stein seems to have had a US readership in mind and I imagine that he must have asked himself repeatedly what he could reasonably expect them to know about France. So when we read that:

… the Paris Mosque [is] a few blocks from the university. (Page 20)

the original being:

… la grande mosquée de Paris, qui était située à quelques rues de la fac. (page 28)

we can assume probably not much – not enough to be able to cope with “a few streets away from”. On the other hand, readers are expected to know what a TGV is (Page 187) and, rather harder, PSG, as on Lempereur’s T-shirt (Page 45) – and would they appreciate the irony of the club being wholly owned by Qatar?

Some things almost defy translation. Marie-Françoise Tanneur explains to François that the advancement of one of their colleagues at the university:

... was due entirely to the fact that he was eating Big Delouze’s pussy. This seemed possible, albeit surprising. … Chantal Delouse, the president of Paris III, had always struck me as a died-in-the-wool lesbian …(Page 20)

the difficult parts of the original being:

… il broutait le minou de la mère Delouze… and … une lesbienne 100% brut de béton …

Perhaps more literally: “grazes Mother Delouze’s pussy” and “a 100% raw concrete lesbian”. So, apart from “Ma” possibly being better than “Big”, it would not be easy to improve upon Stein’s version, although something still gets lost in translation. (Incidentally, béton brut is the origin of Brutalism in architecture).

Sunday, 29 May sees François

… driving along the hexagonal motorway system at two hundred kilometres per hour … (Page 105)

The original being

… traverser, a 200 km/h, le réseau autoroutier hexagonal …

Stein is, for sure, aware that the French archly referring to themselves as inhabitants of l’hexagone (look at a map).  But perhaps for most readers this should have been translated as:

... driving along the French motorway network at two hundred kilometres per hour …

assuming they can’t be credited with understanding the word autoroute – on which the speed limit, by the way, is 130 km/h (81 mph).

On Page 60, we find François settling down for election night TV:

The day before, I’d stocked the fridge with two bottles of Rully. As soon as David Pujadas went on the air at 7.50, I knew this election night would be top-notch …

“top-notch” – the original was “un très grand cru” (page 75). Houellebecq, who often mentions Burgundy wines, could be assumed to be aware that there are no Grand Cru wines produced in the Rully commune which only has the lesser Premier Cru, and chose his words for effect - best left intact?

Less interesting are the odd careless mistakes. Page 52 refers correctly to the rue du Cardinal Mercier, but on Page 49 it had been the rue Cardinal Mercier. Page 64 refers to the rue de Santeuil, as does the original on page 79 – but both should have been rue Santeuil. Page 53 mentions YouTube (correct) and RuTube (wrong); on the original’s page 66 it’s the other way round: Youtube (wrong) and Rutube (right). Perhaps more importantly, on Page 58 François tries to find out what’s going on by searching YouTube – in the original it was Rutube (page 72).

Rather more irritating is the reference on Page 56 to “all twenty-two EU member states” – there are currently 28, is Houellebecq forecasting some departures? But no, the original merely refers to “vingt-deux pays de l’union européenne”, the “all” being a gratuitous addition. I was puzzled on Page 96 when the guard of the locked-up university “emerged from the administration building [and] stood in front of the gate” – to do that he would have had to open up, whereupon the impatient crowd outside would have forced an entry in typical Parisian fashion. The original, not surprisingly, is “derrière les grilles” (page 118), Stein having confused his devant and his derrière.

I found Submission to be an odd mixture of a gripping political thriller and an unconvincing futuristic satire. How offensive it would be to a Muslim I can’t say, Islam not being my faith and not having studied theology, any more than I am equipped to judge whether Houellebecq is providing a sensible account of J-K Huysman’s times and works. It is difficult to imagine Soumission’s publication being helpful in France, even without the Charlie Hebdo attack, but the country has its own particular traditions of free speech and satire and is having its own internal debate about the nature of laïcité. As I write, Marine Le Pen is on trial in Lyon on hate speech charges, while earlier in the month it was reported that her National Front party had won the right to create an association at Sciences Po.

Some aspects of Houellebecq’s futurology seem particularly fanciful. The evaporation of the National Front’s support after the first round of the election seems unlikely, but, of course, Houellebecq’s premise is that France acquiesces peaceably in the new order – which is why Lempereur is not seen again. The notion that the EU by 2023 will be in the process of incorporating Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon and Egypt seems improbable too. On page 233 we are told that “the Muslim parties already occupied government seats in Britain …”. Whatever happens in the 2020 UK general election, the outcome will not be that. But Houellebecq never seems particularly interested in or informed about Angleterre (how Britain is referred to in the original, page 278**). The prominence of a senior academic is defined by the way “he was regularly invited to give lectures at Oxford and St Andrews” (Page 238). Oxford, yes but St Andrews?

As usual though, Houellebecq provides food for thought about France – and plenty of food and drink too. François may microwave Chicken Byrianai, Tikka Masala, and Rogan Josh for himself, but he happily eats Marie-Françoise Tanneur’s south west cooking. I was struck by how the need for an evacuation plan occurs to François early on, but there is a long history of times when leaving Paris for France profonde might have been a sensible idea: 1789, 1848, 1871, 1914, 1940, 1968 … 2022 - it’s not just because of the inheritance laws that Parisian families hang on to properties in the country. Of those dates, perhaps 1940 was foremost in Houellebecq’s mind when writing Soumission, together with the accommodations that many Frenchmen would make in the following four years. Part of Le Pen’s current problem may be her use of the occupation word. 

Would I recommend Submission? To anyone with an interest in France who has the time, probably yes, but Houellebecq’s previous novel, The Map and the Territory, (posted about here last month) was better in my view.


 * At 3472 euros per month (page 148). On Page 170 François tells us this is twice the national average. However, in mid-2014 the average gross wage in France was 2480 euros, net 2180. So Francois seems to have been taking a rosy view of his situation, unless wages fall substantially in the next eight years.

** Similarly on page 241, Rediger’s British mobile number is described as “anglais”.



UPDATE 17 NOVEMBER 2015

I said above that “the premises of Submission seem to have been overtaken by more events than might have been expected so soon” without any anticipation of something like the attacks in Paris on 13 November. It was at the Sorbonne (Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV) yesterday that President Hollande, surrounded by students, observed the minute’s silence for those who had been killed.

Michael White’s Guardian Politics blog on 16 November discusses Submission after the attacks in his piece, France and Britain: the differences in their struggle with extremism.

Long distance information

It would be rash to predict the outcome of the current crisis over Russia, Ukraine and Crimea but no-one seems to be doubting its seriousness. Perhaps with an eye to reassuring the public that “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war”, photographs have been appearing of world leaders on the phone to each other discussing what should be done. The first seems to have been of Obama’s call from the Oval Office to Vladimir Putin:

Obviously the Russian equivalent of NSA and GCHQ wouldn’t be interested in listening to that one, but Obama’s call to David Cameron – well, they would if they could:

This was released via Twitter and subsequently generated numerous parodies with bananas and other surrealist substitutes. François Hollande was at work in the splendours of the Elysée when Obama rang:

who was on the line from Florida:

This is an interesting image - the others only show handsets whereas this shot includes the phone base station:

The LCD screen isn’t as easy to read as the coffee cup, but it also seems to carry the Presidential Seal. The base station and the handsets have some similarities to those of the Cisco VoIP (voice over internet protocol) phone which appears on Wikipedia:

Now, what at auction would be a really expensive phone, Salvador Dali’s Lobster Telephone, c 1938:

Patrick Rotman’s ‘Le Pouvoir’

Having read reports in the UK about Patrick Rotman’s documentary Le Pouvoir (ie 'Power') after it was released in France in May, I was glad to get the opportunity to see it in a cinema recently. Rotman and his crew filmed François Hollande for the first eight months or so of the latter’s presidency which started in May 2012. Most of the time was spent in the Elysée palace but they also travelled with Hollande to the UN in New York and to Brussels. I thought it was a fascinating film even though my limited knowledge of French politics, particularly within Hollande's Parti Socialiste (PS), meant that many of the nuances probably escaped me. (Think of most French observers being oblivious to the undercurrents of a meeting between David Cameron and Boris Johnson.)

What struck me were things like the protocol and pomp and circumstance of the presidency, the slightly faded gilt grandeur of the Elysée, the cavalcade of Citroën C6’s whenever ministers came and went, the nearby officer with the briefcase, the obviously elite entourage, the presidential aircraft and, although I am used to French habits, the time spent hand-shaking and double-kissing (of women by men). And there is something slightly awkward about Hollande – he certainly doesn’t have the born to rule manner of certain old Etonians and all too often looks the odd man out (below at the G8 meeting in the UK last month). On the other hand, on one visit he seemed to have a surprisingly sure touch with ordinary young people.

Just after seeing Le Pouvoir, an article appeared in the July issue of Prospect magazine by Christine Ockrent. In Invisible republic (in print; on their website as What’s Wrong with France) The travails of François Hollande are a symptom of France’s deeper malaise, she makes some crisp comments about the president and his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Hollande’s problem is that although he has mastered the language — unlike Sarkozy, he went to the right schools — he simply doesn’t convey authority. During the presidential campaign in 2012 he tried hard to lose weight and look younger; now he dyes his hair too dark, the way older men do, and his waistline has expanded — though that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since Georges Pompidou, who was rather stout, is now remembered with fondness for his short but successful presidency. In fact, Hollande behaves exactly the way his friends describe him to be in private: good natured with a great sense of humour, a sharp mind and a quick tongue — the kind of jolly, clever fellow one is always pleased to have dinner with when he comes to Paris. He’s like your favourite cousin from Corrèze, the province which has elected him as enthusiastically as it once did Jacques Chirac.

She goes on to criticise France’s “system of énarques et polytechniciens” in terms similar to Peter Gumbel’s which I posted about last month. Hollande’ s “right schools”, by the way, were political science at Sciences Po, economics at the HEC business school and ENA.  Ockrent, described by Prospect as “a journalist and a former Editor-in-Chief of L’Express” is the partner of Bernard Kouchner. When considering her opinions, it is worth knowing (as Prospect readers presumably don’t have to be told) that while latterly a minister under Sarkozy, Kouchner was previously involved with the highest levels of the PS.

Rotman (born 1949) has made documentaries about various French politicians including François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and Lionel Jospin. A British equivalent might seem to be Michael Cockerell, but he provides a voice-over commentary and interviews his subjects (eg Boris Johnson) whereas in Le Pouvoir Rotman merely observes without expressing opinions himself. The film has been referred to as a fly-on-the-wall documentary (eg in The Times (£) on 15 May) but as the faces around the table at Hollande’s first ministerial meeting - so many of them, so many C6s - reveal, the cameras were clearly evident and not exactly welcome. Direct cinema or cinéma vérité would probably be a more accurate description. It seems unlikely that Rotman’s film will appeared subtitled for Anglophone audiences – if it did, I would want to see it again.

A New New Franc!

Posts here in the past have raised the possibility of France leaving the Eurozone or the euro’s collapse (eg in 2011 and most recently in 2012) but raising the subject has always seemed more “raving” than “droning”. So I was surprised to see the essay article below in the current issue of Le Figaro Magazine:

“THIS EVENING THE EURO IS DEAD…”
Speech by the President of the Republic

It was written by Philippe Villin, énarque, banker and journalist and, according to Wikipedia, a member of Le Siècle, so a man firmly embodied in the French elite. In his article Villin imagines the speech which François Hollande would give at 11pm on 7 July 2013 announcing this revolution:

Françaises, Français, chers concitoyens, l’euro est mort. A minuit, le nouveau nouveau franc, le NNF, sera notre nouvelle monnaie. …

And he goes on to explain the background to his decision to introduce the NNF* at parity with the euro. It is primarily due to the double problem of French economic competitiveness in the euro – with Germany internally and in US$ terms externally. A ‘euro of the south’ was ruled out as too weak for France and Italy and too strong for the others. France’s euro debts would be repaid in NNF.  Hollande ends with a passage reminiscent of Harold Wilson’s 1967 sterling devaluation “pound in your pocket” speech:

Demain matin, la vie sera normale: transports, téléphone, télévisions fonctionneront, les magasins seront ouverts … les vaches auront donne du lait, le soleil brillera selon Metéo France …**

There is a satirical element to the whole piece, which, incidentally, describes Villin as a staunch supporter of returning to the franc, for example its annotation as “PCC François Hollande” (pour copie conforme being the French equivalent of CC, once known in English as 'carbon copy').

I hope Villin's article gets translated and appears in the UK media.  The NNF may not impossible, but its announcement on 7 July 2013 seems highly unlikely.

* The last new franc (nouveau franc NF) was introduced in January 1960 by revaluation from 100 old francs.

** Tomorrow morning, life will be normal***: transport, telephones, television will work, the shops will open ... the cows will give milk, the sun will shine according to France Metéo …

*** In the presidential election in 2012, Hollande was sold as ‘Monsieur Normale’, in contrast with his predecessor.

President Hollande and us

I like Toby Young’s writing (he’s @toadmeister on Twitter), even though I sometimes disagree with him. Of course, his father’s books made an impression on my generation, The Rise of the Meritocracy being required reading for any university-bound sixth-former. Admittedly some of us might have interpreted it as encouragement rather than as satire. Also my having commented as ‘Western Independent’ on a couple of Toby Young’s Daily Telegraph blog posts last year still misleads some of his readers into hitting on here. For which I am grateful, even if it goes to show that he used to get many more readers than I ever will.

I say “used to” because @toadmeister’s Telegraph blog ceased when he started to write a column for the Sun on Sunday. On 14 May, it included the following, under the heading France feeding frenzy:

NEW French president Francois Hollande has a novel theory to explain the problems afflicting the eurozone. Forget about restrictive employment laws, unaffordable welfare systems and soaring levels of public debt. And, of course, it’s got absolutely nothing to do with the folie de grandeur that is the single currency. The real reason, apparently, is because Britain treats the Continent like a “self-service restaurant”. Come again, Inspector Clouseau? What he’s trying to say is that we just help ourselves to all the goodies without wanting to pay for them. Which is quite cheeky. Our annual contribution to the EU budget has just gone up by more than £1billion to £16.6billion. How much do we get in return? Much less than that. We’ve been members of the EU for 40 years and in 39 of them we’ve been net contributors to the EU budget. So no, Monsieur le President. It’s more like an all-you-can-eat buffet in which Britain is the only thing on the menu.

The original was laid out almost entirely as one sentence paragraphs. In fact, Young’s style in the Sun is clearly focussed on what he thinks its readership has a taste for. Fortunately the distinction between pastiche and parody is unlikely to worry many of them. More analytically, the Gunning Fog Index (an Indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading) is 8.61 for the piece above. By contrast his Status Anxiety article in the Spectator on 5 May had an index of 12.05 and the first section of Chapter 3 of his How To Set Up a Free School is 14.12.

But what did Francois Hollande actually say? His remarks (commented on elsewhere in the British press) come from answers to questions put by French Slate:

Vous n’avez pas non plus été reçu par David Cameron, le Premier ministre, et la presse britannique et la City n’ont pas forcément été tendres à votre égard. Sur quelles bases comptez-vous renforcer la relation franco-britannique?  

Reconnaissons que les Britanniques ont été particulièrement timides sur les enjeux de la régulation financière, et attentifs aux seuls intérêts de la City. D’où leurs réticences à la mise en place de la taxe sur les transactions financières et à l’harmonisation fiscale en Europe. Et qui s’ajoutent à une relative indifférence à l’égard du sort de la zone euro, car la Grande-Bretagne est davantage protégée de la spéculation puisque la Banque centrale peut intervenir directement pour le financement de la dette. L’Europe n’est pas un tiroir caisse et encore moins un self service.  

Je rencontrerai rapidement David Cameron pour évoquer les avantages d’une coopération plus poussée de nos deux pays au plan industriel et pour poursuivre le rapprochement engagé en matière de défense.

which can possibly be translated as:

You have not been received by David Cameron, the Prime Minister, and the British press and the City inevitably have not shown you much consideration. On what basis do you intend to strengthen the Franco-British relationship?  

[We] recognize that the British have been particularly half-hearted in the financial regulation stakes, and focussed on the particular interests of the City. Hence their reluctance towards the introduction of the tax on financial transactions and towards fiscal harmonization in Europe. And additionally a relative indifference to the fate of the euro zone, because Britain is more protected from speculation since the central bank [ie Bank of England] can intervene directly in debt financing. Europe is not a cash register, and still less a self-service restaurant.  

I will meet David Cameron soon to discuss the benefits of a more thrusting cooperation between our two countries in industrial planning and to pursue the coming together on defence matters already agreed.

(Of course, he's already met Ed Miliband).  But if the above has the sense right, it’s not the relationship between the UK and the EU which is like a self-service restaurant, but that between the UK government and the Bank of England, ie our cash register. Hollande might even be envious of it. Slate went on to ask (in English):

Mister Hollande, do you speak English?  

Yes I speak English, more fluently than the former President. But a French president has to speak French!

which was probably an énarque’s dig at Sarkozy who seemingly failed to graduate from the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po, one of the grandes écoles) in 1981 because of a «note éliminatoire en anglais»!

David Cameron – a gambling man?

Early on in his premiership, David Cameron stayed on after finishing the 8:10am spot on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and intervened in the sports bulletin’s racing tips:

If you're a fan of the coalition you could go for Daring Dream in the 3.50 at Ayr and if you're slightly more sceptical about how our arrangements are going to work out you could try Midnight Fantasy in the 3pm at Wolverhampton. That's 10-1, Midnight Fantasy. I think that's going to be my nap selection.

Which suggested a certain familiarity with the turf, although both horses lost. As did his two choices after another Today appearance almost a year later. Again, while selecting Stormin’ Gordon and Red Samantha must have been irresistible, neither horse did well, coming in at sixth and ninth.

But the PM has some more serious races and winners to worry about. Firstly, the outcome of the election for Mayor of London on 3 May still seems as close as when I posted about it last month. Perhaps the next (now overdue) opinion poll will reflect some of the critical media coverage of Ken Livingstone’s financial arrangements. Cameron must surely want a Conservative win, for normal party reasons and to keep Boris Johnson away from the Commons.

Cameron’s trip to the US probably had far more media coverage here than there – as no doubt did Obama’s visit to the UK last year. A distinct impression was given that Cameron finds Obama more to his taste than any of the Republican candidates in terms of policies. But it’s interesting that the legendary James Carville doesn’t think Obama is a shoo-in in November. It would be surprising if Cameron hadn’t taken the opportunity to send appropriate signals to senior Republicans during the New York stage of his visit. In practice, the relationship between a future Republican president and the UK Coalition would be very likely to carry on as before. Nonetheless, if Obama doesn’t get back, Cameron might be seen in Britain as having got too close to the loser. All the brotherhood-of-world-leader type images being stored up for the next UK election would have to be junked too.

Finally, in the French presidential campaign Cameron seems to have hitched himself to Sarkozy, notably during an interview with Le Figaro in February:

Vous avez souhaité «bonne chance» à votre «ami» Nicolas Sarkozy? Comptez-vous lui adresser d'autres signes de soutien durant la campagne?
Nicolas Sarkozy est un dirigeant du centre droit et je lui souhaite bonne chance. Il a de grandes qualités de chef, c'est un homme politique courageux. Il a fait des choses extraordinairement importantes pour la France. Ce sera au peuple français de décider, je n'ai pas à interférer dans son choix. Nicolas Sarkozy a mon soutien. Je le dis clairement. Mais je ne suis pas sûr que si je sillonnais la France en bus pour le soutenir, cela serait efficace… 

You wished your "friend" Nicolas Sarkozy "good luck"? Will you send him other signs of support during the campaign?
Nicolas Sarkozy is a leader from the centre-right and I wish him luck. He has great leadership qualities, he is a brave politician. He has done some extraordinarily important things for France. It will be up to the French people to decide, and not for me to interfere in their choice. Nicolas Sarkozy has my support. I say it clearly. But I'm not sure if I were to criss-cross France on a campaign bus to support him, it would be helpful ...

In political terms this is understandable. The other main contender for the Presidency, François Hollande, aligns with the left of the Labour party (perhaps even to the left of the Liberal Democrats in the days before they joined the Coalition).  When Hollande came to London (with an eye on the French electors living in “Paris sur Thames”) at the end of February, he met Miliband but none of the Coalition. Both sides presumably had reached the same conclusion: such a meeting wouldn’t benefit them. Recent polls have been showing Sarkozy as running very close to Hollande in the first (multi-candidate) round of the election, but the latter still being ahead in the second (the two remaining best candidates) round on 6 May. The impact of the recent tragic shootings in South West France remains to be seen. The Times veteran Paris correspondent, Charles Bremner, reported (£) today (20 March):

Two weeks ago the top topic in France’s presidential campaign was not the economy or the euro crisis, but the manner in which Muslim and Jewish tradition requires animals to be slaughtered.
The matter was raised by Marine Le Pen, the candidate for the National Front, who is running in third place. She claimed that a majority of Parisians were being sold halal and kosher meat without being told.
President Sarkozy, who has taken a swing into National Front territory in his hunt for votes, then demanded that all meat be labelled to show whether or not it had been killed via Jewish or Muslim ritual. A few days later he pronounced that the issue was over — but the damage was done.
No one is making any link between the murders in Toulouse and Montauban and the presidential campaign, but the entry of the racial theme into the election left an exceedingly bad taste. It reflected the degree to which the airing of resentment over Muslim immigration has almost gone mainstream.

Cameron wrote to Sarkozy today in terms that he would, of course, have used to any French President in such circumstances:

I was appalled to learn of the recent shootings that France has suffered, including in Toulouse this morning. People across Britain share the shock and grief that is being felt in France, and my thoughts are with the victims, their friends and their families. I know that France will draw strength and comfort from your resolute leadership at this difficult time. You can count on my every support in confronting these senseless acts of brutality and cowardice.

There seem to be three very close races, two in May and one in November, on which Cameron has placed a Johnson-Sarkozy-Obama wager. While not an “accumulator” in betting terms, he is running the risk of a reputational loss at home if he is wrong on any of them. If a Republican takes over the Presidency in Washington next January, no doubt March’s visit will be forgiven and forgotten. Rebuilding bridges with a socialist in the Elysée after May might be harder work.

ADDENDUM 21 MARCH

Most posts get overtaken by events but not many as soon as this one.

As far as the London mayoral race is concerned, the new polling data has arrived and shows Johnson at 54% against Livingstone at 46% (once down to a choice of two). So Cameron can probably start to think about his winnings on that one. I stand by my opinion that there won’t be that much damage to Ed Miliband. The poll shows that in a national election the Labour share of the vote in London is 46%, the Conservatives are on 34% and LibDems at 9%. It is Livingstone’s inability to enthuse Labour’s natural voters that’s the problem, although Miliband was probably unwise to express support in connection with the candidate’s financial arrangements.

The implications of the aftermath of the tragedy in France will become apparent in the remaining weeks of their presidential campaign. Perhaps the impact on voting will not be that great in the end.

ADDENDUM 6 MAY

Won one, lost one! Both were close run, but the winner is the winner. Boris Johnson took 51.5% of the votes in the London Mayoral race after redistribution of second votes. In France, François Hollande had [just under] 52% of the votes in the second round for the Presidency. From Cameron’s point of view, Boris didn’t do so well as to make him any greater a threat, but his victory might prove exploitable as the beginning of a turnaround in the Tories’ current misfortunes. However, Cameron’s having got so close to Sarkozy now looks inept. In the longer term the relative performance of the UK and France economies may be more of an embarrassment to him – or prove to be a vindication.