Already bored of Boris? So are the French...

I missed Boris’s coronation. I left for Paris with my family on Monday afternoon, just as they began to turn up the heat. From that moment on I was no longer in communication with Britain. When he was elected leader, my Parisian host turned on Sky News. I wasn’t surprised. The only thing that was striking was the extent of the massacre. Head upon head tumbled into the basket outside 10 Downing Street, while the faithful were richly rewarded with portfolios and dossiers.

As far as France was concerned the timing of Boris’s kissing hands with the Queen might have been chosen on purpose: he missed all the heavyweight weeklies, which go to press on Tuesday night – Le Point, L’Express, Nouvel Obs, not forgetting Charlie Hebdo and French political life was on the point of being suspended for the summer.

On Thursday and Boris’s first day in office, the mercury hit 42.6 degrees in Paris, or as Jacob Rees-Mogg would insist: 108.68 degrees Fahrenheit. As we picnicked in the Tuileries a woman stopped breathing and had to be carried off. We took refuge in the church of St Roch in the rue St Honoré where a kind soul greeted us with cups of cold water. The city sizzled and the politicians (together with the journalists) scuttled away to their holiday boltholes. The sight of a blacked-out government car flanked by outriders speeding down an uncannily empty rue de Rivoli seemed incongruous: it was perhaps some minister late for his or her flight?

It was certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility: on 26 July Le Figaro ran a piece on where French ministers go on holiday and what they do to relax, an article so wretched and trivial it might have been culled from some British rag. On page 6, however, the paper provided a serious rundown of the new hard-right Cabinet written by its London correspondent Florent Collomp. The team was characterised as a ‘rebel army’ – the takeover ‘the Night of the Long Knives’. Collomp was keen to stress that Boris was distancing himself from the Faragistes, and that the real purpose of the new regime was less to ‘Brexit’ than to ‘beat Jeremy Corbyn’. Elsewhere in the paper Collomp wrote a rapid-fire summary of events since 2012, pointing out there was a ‘permanent constitutional crisis’, and that the Queen was quite likely to outlive Boris (politically at least) even if the end of her reign looked like being less than glorious.

There had been a few presents handed out to the new élite, like the poisoned chalice passed to Boris’s deputy Michael Gove. Collomp spotted that it was ‘Vote Leave’ all over again, with Dominic Cummings made operations chief at Number 10. And there was the gift that keeps on giving of Jacob Rees-Mogg ‘leader of the most Europhobic fringe of the Tories’. On 31 July Nouvel Obs called Rees-Mogg ‘Trump in a top hat’, but they managed to misspell ‘Eton’, which slightly spoiled the effect.

The last meeting of the French cabinet before the recess was on Wednesday 24 July. The politicians were not due back before 10 September. Emmanuel Macron left Paris the next morning and he and Brigitte were already installed in the Presidential holiday home, the Château de Bregançon near Bormes-Les-Mimosa on the Provencal coast. It transpired he’d had a chat with Boris, as indeed had Angela Merkel. Boris’s fierce message to them both was to demand the abolition of the hated ‘backstop’.

On Friday the weather broke and I left for Brittany. I went to stay with an old friend, an ‘énarque’ (a graduate of the élite Ecole Nationale d’Administration which has provided all but three Presidents of the Fifth Republic) on the coast near Dinard. My friend suggested I go to the Sunday morning market at St Briac and do a ‘vox pop’ – asking the locals what they thought. It was pretty clear that Boris’s election would hardly have come as a shock – the surprise would have been the elevation of his rival. Three years of British dithering over Brexit had made the story stale, and even a new chapter, with promises of more punch-ups in Brussels, was not going to inspire the wary French public to an access of enthusiasm for Boris or Brexit.

On Saturday 27 July Figaro ran a story in its centre pages in which it quoted the Minister of European Affairs, Amélie de Monchalin saying ‘Boris – the electoral campaign is over – calm down!’ She added ‘We need to behave properly towards one another.’ The article concluded that the real change to come about through the apotheosis of Boris was that the political agenda would no longer be shaped by a need to agree to a fresh British extension. Now there was genuine doubt as to whether there would ever be an agreement. Elsewhere, there was actually a pro-Boris opinion piece written by the right-wing Quebecois intellectual Mathieu Bock-Côté which argued that the new Prime Minister should be given a chance to restore British sovereignty, but then again, this is apparently Bock-Côté’s hobbyhorse.

On 30 July, Le Monde wrote that although Boris was keen to show off his muscles there had still been no ‘active dialogue’ with the EU. The European Commission was reported as saying that ‘London does not want to talk to us at the moment’ and that probably nothing would happen before the meeting of G7 at Biarritz from 24 to 26 August. Le Figaro featured Boris’s desire to live with his mistress at Number 11, as the prime ministerial flat at Number 10 possessed just two bedrooms: apparently the reason why the youthful premiers Blair and Cameron joined their children in the roomier private quarters of Number 11. Where would Javid keep his young family? Who would feed Larry the Cat? These questions remained sadly unanswered.

On 31 July, the weeklies finally caught up with Boris’s rise to power, or at least there were articles in the Nouvel Obs and Le Point. The former pointed out the dire position of the pound and quoted the Western Union’s Joe Manimbo saying Brussels had little desire to return to the negotiating table. Le Point reported on Boris’s intention of maintaining the shape of the current border in Ireland and his ‘Operation Seduction’ (sic) in Scotland and Wales. Neither was exactly the lead story. Boris is not a new face for the French, just old wine in a new bottle; and frankly who cares, when it’s so hot and you have already heeded the siren call from the beach? There will be plenty of time to blot his copy book in the autumn.