If I were Blair, I would be feeling really rather grateful to the French. Until this week, he has faced a British press that has been exceedingly liverish about the war in Iraq.
The Daily Mirror is against; the Independent faint-hearted; The Times uncertain; the BBC riddled with doubt. General after general has stood up to warn against the rashness of the enterprise. The bishops are leery in the extreme.
[...]
Just as everyone was laying into the Number 10 spin machine, the French did something so disgusting, so selfish, and so French, that the British media have had no choice. The press has dropped Alastair Campbell's dodgy dossier, in favour of that time-honoured staple of the British journalist - the orgy of frog-bashing.
Confronted by French treachery, previously fence-sitting newspapers such as the Daily Mail have suddenly seen the merit of the war, and the downmarket tabloids have gone gallistic. You know the kind of articles: they involve references to Vichy, tanks with reverse gears, garlic-guzzling peasants, women of loose morals cosying up to the Boche, and they traditionally end with the cry: "And they eat our children's ponies!"
[...]
For the first time in the build-up to action against Iraq, the newspapers of the Anglosphere are united in a blizzard of abuse against the French. In Paris, Le Monde has finally been obliged to translate Bart Simpson's phrase that is now on everyone's lips.
The French, say the mass-circulation papers in Britain and America, are nothing but "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" (les primates capitulards toujours en quete de fromage), and, you know what, I couldn't agree more.
[...]
It [French, German and Belgian obstructionism] does not mean the end of Nato. It does not even mean the end of the attempts to construct a Heath Robinson-style European "Common Foreign and Security Policy". But are we really going to share a single constitution with France and Germany, of a kind now being drawn up by Giscard in Brussels? And will Blair really try to push that through without holding a referendum?
I am told that the Prime Minister is so keen on the euro that he was considering sacking the Chancellor in 2004, and holding it then. Has that ambition survived this week? Is Blair really still asking us to share a currency with this lot? Mangez mes culottes, as they are by now saying in Paris.
Hilarious.
I've lived in England twice and I can assure you that the British have hated the French forever, God bless them!
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