Michel Barnier, who has just been appointed prime minister of France, has long observed a touching tradition when he visits his family estate.
Pride of place there goes to an ancient oak and the 73-year-old has a habit of kneeling down in front of it and paying homage to the tree’s longevity.
If only the French electorate had a similarly reverential attitude to a man who has enjoyed such a long career in politics that he has been dubbed ‘the French Joe Biden’.
Instead, the appointment of this venerable old hack has sparked a chorus of name-calling.
Barnier was ‘from Jurassic Park: not only a fossil, but fossilised from political life’, said one MP from Marine Le Pen’s populist-Right National Rally party.
‘The French have been taken for idiots,’ exclaimed Marine Tondelier, secretary general of the EELV Green Party. ‘They will remember it.’
Barnier’s appointment will go down no better on this side of the Channel. Unless you’re a Remoaner of course.
As a despairing Nigel Farage said yesterday: ‘An EU fanatic as French prime minister would, sadly, suit the Labour government.’
For Macron’s choice means we now have two Brexit-wreckers in power in both London and Paris.
In Britain, Keir Starmer, the man who led the doomed campaign for a second referendum, and in France the man who turned Theresa May into chopped liver during the Brexit negotiations.
Who can forget the sight of Barnier, then the EU’s chief negotiator – both a choir boy and a boy scout in his youth, posing for the cameras at the first meeting to discuss the terms of Britain’s divorce from the EU with a bulky pile of papers in front of him.
David Davis and his fellow UK negotiators, in contrast, were empty-handed – and much of the European and Europhile British media gloried in the apparently superior preparation of the EU side.
In fact, all it amounted to was a statement of intent. Barnier and his team were gearing up to argue over every jot and tittle, every comma and colon, every cent and penny.
As Oscar Wilde once wrote: ‘A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.’
Instead of approaching the negotiations in a constructive manner and making an attempt to smooth the process, he was looking to squeeze us till the pips squeaked.
As Barnier threatened at the outset of the talks: ‘We intend to teach people what leaving the single market means.’
But now many ‘people’ are already questioning how long he can last. Barnier is Macron’s fifth prime minister in seven years and he was appointed only after eight weeks of dithering.
At 73, he is also the oldest of the 26 prime ministers in modern France’s Fifth Republic. He replaces the youngest, Gabriel Attal, 34 when he was appointed just eight months ago.
Attal was also France’s first openly gay prime minister and some of Macron’s political opponents quickly dug up the fact that, in parliament in 1981, the new prime minister had been among 155 lawmakers who voted against equalising the age of consent.
Barnier’s only qualification for the job seems to have been his willingness to accept it. He’s mistrusted by the Left, the largest bloc in the National Assembly, and ridiculed by many on the Eurosceptic populist Right. The idea that Barnier can find a majority in parliament to address the multiple economic and social crises facing France seems like fantasy. By one count, he will have the support of only 66 deputies in an Assembly of 577.
Worse, he will have the in-tray from hell. What our own doom-laden Chancellor Rachel Reeves might call a black hole has opened up in the French budget, which can only be cured by savage spending cuts or massive tax rises.
The deficit is projected to reach 5.6 per cent of GDP this year and 6.25 per cent next year, well beyond the permitted 3 per cent EU limit. Not that Brussels will do anything to punish Europe’s scofflaw. But the bond markets are less charitable.
That said, the baffled reaction to the appointment in France suggests that the choice of Barnier may benefit, of all people, Marine Le Pen.
The leader of the populist National Rally was unusually equivocal about the appointment yesterday. ‘Michel Barnier seems to be someone who is respectful of the different political forces and the National Rally, which is the largest group of the National Assembly,’ she said.
The Left, and even some of her own supporters, suspect she’s done a deal with Macron in which her bloc in the Assembly will finally be listened to.
Could this mean Macron recognises his effort to bury the Right has failed? It would be a humiliating U-turn for the president, whose antics since June have been designed to crush Le Pen.
Or just that the president has finally realised his mission to find a new government has run aground, and the best he can hope for is a technocratic caretaker government.
The Left, meanwhile, is predictably furious. ‘The denial of democracy has reached its peak,’ squealed the Socialist leader Olivier Faure, on the appointment of a prime minister from a party that finished in fourth place.
Barnier was certainly not Macron’s first choice. His name emerged only on Wednesday night after half a dozen alternatives turned the job down. It’s not likely that Macron has calmed the febrile atmosphere, and more likely that he’s poured petrol on the fire.
‘The President has appointed a loser of an ultra-minority political force at the polls and a marginal group in the National Assembly,’ said Benjamin Lucas, a Socialist deputy.
Barnier, who is married with three children, is a quintessential technocrat. ‘He has the charisma of an artichoke,’ was the scathing verdict of a senior official who worked with him in Paris.
Brexit seems to have been the highlight of a lengthy but unremarkable political career in which Barnier has cycled through dozens of jobs, including foreign minister, before being dispatched to Brussels where he was right at home.
He’s a fanatical European, believing in a deeper and wider Europe, on the model espoused by the late Jacques Delors.
Before Brexit, his most notable achievement was his leading role in the organisation of the 1992 Winter Olympic Games in his hometown of Albertville. When one French diplomat heard back in 1999 that Barnier had been picked as France’s European Commissioner, he exclaimed: ‘A ski instructor?’
After his starring role in Brexit, he ran to be the candidate of his party, Les Républicains, in the 2022 presidential election. He stimulated the enthusiasm of nobody, coming third.
Perhaps his appeal is that he’s essentially dull. He certainly isn’t in step with public sentiment. He’s a centre-Rightist in a country that rejected Macron’s centrism in favour of the hard-Left and populist Right.
His attraction for Macron seems to owe more to the president’s desperation for a warm body than any conceivable appeal he might offer to French voters.