Macron has extended the hand of friendship to Britain
The Queen’s state funeral, due to take place next Monday morning, promises to bring together more heads of state and other world leaders than any international gathering of recent years, including the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Joe Biden, President of the United States, will be there (though not, one imagines, President Putin of Russia). There is even a chance – who knows? – that President Zelensky of Ukraine will turn up to pay his respects (how welcome that would be). Kings, queens, presidents and potentates from across the world will gather to offer their condolences to King Charles and to renew their friendship with the United Kingdom.
But of all the leaders who will make their way to Westminster Abbey, none, other than Liz Truss, stands to gain more than President Emmanuel Macron of France.
Macron has done his best to prepare the way. Upon hearing of the Queen’s death, he immediately ordered that the nightly illumination of the Eiffel Tower be suspended. The country’s most famous monument went dark, just as it did after the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015.
But the President was not done. In a statement that won plaudits across the UK, he issued a statement in which he said that the Queen represented “a sense of eternity” amid the fluctuations and upheavals of politics.
“She held a special status in France,” he went on, “and a special place in the hearts of the French people. No foreign sovereign has climbed the stairs of the Elysée Palace more often than she, who honoured France with six state visits and met each of its presidents. For her, French was not a mere relic of Norman ancestry that persisted in so many customs, but an intimate, cherished language. The Queen of sixteen kingdoms loved France, which loved her back. This evening, the people of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth are mourning their Queen. The people of France join them in their grief.”
What came across, to the surprise, perhaps, of many, was the heartfelt nature of the President’s words – a quality he subsequently showed in a televised address in which he paid tribute to the Queen’s role in ensuring that France and the UK “shared not just an entente cordiale, but a warm, sincere and loyal partnership”.
No Continental leader was more disturbed and disappointed by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union than Emmanuel Macron, whose arrival in power came at the end of the first, brittle and angry, twelve months of the Brexit negotiations. He was at least as shocked as David Cameron by the result of the referendum, which cut directly across his own passionately held view that what Europe needed most was further and deeper integration.
Over the next two years, it was France – that is to say, Macron – that did most to impose harsh conditions on the UK as it sought to extricate itself from the EU. He had hoped to create an effective triumvirate in Europe, in which Cameron, despite being, perforce, an opponent of the single currency and open borders, would join him and Germany’s Angela Merkel as the acknowledged heads of a superpower that at last could speak its name. This, as the referendum vote made clear, was wishful thinking. It was never on the cards. What the governing Tory Party wanted, having disposed of both Cameron and his interim successor Theresa May, was a clean break with as few loose ends as possible. In place of collegiality, Britain led with the amused contempt of Boris Johnson, to which Macron responded in kind, rupturing the entente to the point that little remained but bad blood and soiled reputations.
It may be that Liz Truss will pay no special heed to Macron on the day of the funeral or, more likely, the day after. She may choose to cosy up to President Biden or to the more important Commonwealth leaders in attendance. But that would be a mistake. Britain and France are natural allies, most obviously in the related fields of defence and security, but also more generally. If the Prime Minister and the French President can use their mutual sense of loss at the Queen’s passing to see past the last five years and to commit to a renewed partnership in which rancour and mistrust are replaced by shared citizenship within a broader-based Europe, much will have been accomplished.
It needs only a few words uttered at the right time and in the right place for the magic of royalty to do its work. Macron has already indicated his willingness to move on from recent indignities and if not to embrace Brexit Britain, at least to share “a warm, sincere and loyal partnership”. The King will have appreciated the President’s démarche, which went far beyond the requirements of protocol. His prime minister would do well to follow suit.
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