Jonathan Miller | The Spectator columnists & writers

Macron’s axed French TV license is a lesson for BBC campaigners

President Macron has finally found a policy he is capable of getting through the disputatious National Assembly, with a little help from Marine Le Pen and the rump centrist Républicains. He is abolishing the €138 (£116) redevance audiovisuelle, the rough equivalent of the TV licence. It was sold as a measure to tackle the cost of living crisis and passed despite the predictable squeals of the left and the French media elites which see the redevance as their special honey pot. The redevance generates a colossal €3.2 billion (£2.7 billion) annually and its suppression will gain approving hurrahs from those who yearn for a similar liquidation of the British TV licence. But there’s less to this reform than meets the eye.

Is the world’s first supersonic business jet a flight of fancy?

It was Barbara Amiel, whose copy I used to edit at the Sunday Times, who first alerted me to the important point that one private jet isn’t enough. One jet is always in the wrong place. Or having heavy maintenance. Two was the minimum, she said. Plenty of others appear to live by the same maxim. Roman Abramovich has five jets, including a Boeing 787 Dreamliner worth $350 million. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos et al. are not short of a jet or two either. But soon all these symbols of tycoonery may be made obsolete by the world’s first supersonic business jet, announced by a start-up unfortunately named Boom Supersonic (presumably after the noise its aircraft will make when it passes overhead). Boom insists it has solved the sonic boom problem (which raises the question of why the company is in fact named Boom).

Why Ryanair is the best airline

According to Richard Branson, the secret to running a successful airline is to keep the staff happy. They will, in turn, be nice to the passengers, who will themselves be happy and flock to fly. A charming if naive theory. Virgin Atlantic, run on this principle, has teetered on the edge of insolvency for years. Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary, on the other hand, doesn’t seem especially obsessed with the morale of either his cabin crews or his passengers. He cares about watching the pennies and making sure his planes run on time. He is a brutal negotiator. When Willie Mullins, who trained his 60 racehorses, tried to increase his fees, O’Leary withdrew every single horse from his yard. When Boeing demanded he pay more for new jets, O’Leary called them ‘delusional’.

Macron’s state of denial

Crisis? What crisis? Emmanuel Macron emerged from his bunker tonight to speak to France for the first time since his party’s humiliation in Sunday’s legislative elections. In an eight minute television address – the briefest I can recall from the usually loquacious president – he had absolutely nothing substantive to say. There was not an ounce of contrition. Indeed he claimed that his portmanteau party Renaissance, née La République En Marche, had actually won the election by remaining the largest group in the Assembly. This is despite losing 150 of his deputies and his presidential majority. But there were plenty of bromides and temporisation. He said the situation would be clarified in coming days: ‘We must compromise…we must govern differently,’ he declared.

Macron’s nightmare is complete

French president Emmanuel Macron has been humiliated by voters, weeks after being re-elected by an unenthusiastic electorate. The hyper-president with ambitions to lead Europe looks like he will not even be able to lead France. His legislative project, headlined by pension reform and raising the retirement age, appears doomed. France looks more ungovernable than ever. There’s a possibility that parliament might be dissolved within a year and new elections held. It is a ‘nightmare scenario’ for the president, admitted Le Monde this morning. The result of the election is much worse for Macron than almost anyone anticipated. For the first time in the fifth republic the president has failed to win a parliamentary majority.

Macron’s Plan B

Emmanuel Macron is about to activate his Plan B. If he cannot control the National Assembly, after the current round of legislative elections, he will simply bypass it, creating a new ‘people’s assembly’ with which he might appear to consult the French. This would obviate the need to refer or defer to the elected members of the National Assembly, for which he’s never had much respect. On Sunday night’s talk shows, Macron’s team were already explaining how such a body would keep him ‘in touch’ with voters should the actual elected politicians in the actual Assemblée decline to co-operate with the president. There was, perhaps surprisingly, no pushback against such an idea, which might seem to be treating democracy with a certain lassitude.

Abolish the railways!

As the country is held hostage once again by the rail unions, it’s time for the nation to ask itself: does it need trains at all? The last time anyone dared ask this question was 60 years ago when Dr Richard Beeching boldly closed more than 2,000 stations and 5,000 miles of track. The time has come to finish the job and shut down the rest of Britain’s viciously expensive, underperforming and fundamentally inefficient rail network. The economic reasons for doing so are irrefutable, no matter how the railroad anoraks might sputter. Originally private, then nationalised, then privatised again, then morphed into an odd hybrid in which tax subsidies are higher than ever, British railways are hideously expensive, uncomfortable and unreliable.

Why Jeremy Corbyn is being feted by the French left

Into the three-ring circus of the French legislative election campaign has stepped Jeremy Corbyn. The papi magique arrived on the Eurostar last weekend to campaign for candidates of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose insurrectionary ultra-left campaign is threatening to deny the recently re-elected Emmanuel Macron a presidential majority in the parliament. First round voting is on Sunday. A runoff will be a week later. Those tempted to overlook the continuing appeal of Mr Corbyn and dismiss him as a political has-been or even an unreconstructed Marxist clown, would perhaps have been startled to see him mobbed by adoring fans in Paris. Corbyn was feted as a red prince from over the water. And of course he immediately provoked an anti-Semitism row in France.

Macron vs the deep state

French diplomats are on strike today. But will anyone notice? Not to be immodest, I am especially well qualified to comment on French diplomacy. Some time ago, between gigs in Washington DC, I was employed as a consultant by the French embassy there. The embassy is a modern building in Georgetown, conveniently near all the best restaurants, although the food at the embassy itself was both fabulous and cheaper than McDonalds. The wine list was, obviously, exceptional. I was not allowed to see deeply into the embassy’s most sensitive operations (there was a mysterious wing that seemed to be entirely occupied by spooks) but must admit that in the scientific service where I worked as an astonishingly well-paid editor, there was very little sign of stress.

What the French get right about guns

When a French friend invited me to the local shooting range here in my canton in the south of France, I was simultaneously intrigued and a little horrified, in a reticent British way. Guns are not really respectable in England. The carnage wrought by firearms in America would seem to make anyone advocating the right to own them something of a pariah. The French have a different attitude. Guns are legal to own here. Not just shotguns for hunting and clay pigeon shooting. But semi-automatic rifles including assault-type long guns and more or less any kind of handgun, except for the ones that fire armour-penetrating bullets. Here’s what I discovered at the shooting club. Shooting is, quite literally, a blast. After a couple of hours learning the basics of the Glock semi-automatic pistol, I was hooked.

The madness of France’s burkini bust-up

To burkini, or not to burkini? This is the question that divides France in the run-up to the first round of voting on 12 June for the next National Assembly. The pre-election political conversation here had been pretty stale and entirely predictable. Enter the burkini. The political and media class is presently talking of nothing else. Not since Brigitte Bardot took her top off in God Created Woman has the nation obsessed so compulsively with appropriate female swimwear. Designed originally for Australian lifeguards uncomfortable with traditional swimwear, the burkini has not gone down well since arriving in France five years ago. Something about the garment seems to drive the French to distraction. The burkini has been widely banned by mayors of the left and right.

France’s new prime minister will never overshadow Macron

Meet Élisabeth Borne, the new prime minister of France. Borne has hardly worked a day in the private sector. She is a technocrat to her bone marrow. She has never been elected to anything. And she will never, ever threaten president Emmanuel Macron. ‘She’s like Jean Castex (the outgoing prime minister) in drag, without the comical side,’ sighs one Paris insider. The job of prime minister in France is generally hellish, essentially that of a whipping boy, and Borne faces numerous vexing dossiers. At the top of the pile is the cost of living crisis, over which her power seems minimal. She’ll also get pension reform, so she will be blamed for the inevitable riots to come. She’s stronger on running railways than economics.

Macron’s main opponent is now Mélenchon, not Le Pen

Here we go again. Exhausted by a presidential campaign that ultimately produced the same choice as in 2017 (and the same result), French voters go to the polls again on June 12 and June 19 to vote for their National Assembly. Quite possibly with the same results as last time. The denizens of the Café de la Paix are not mesmerised. Abstention is likely to be high. To call it a singular election is to immediately mislead. It’s not one election but 577 of them. It’s democracy, but not especially edifying. Ultimately more than 8,000 candidates are likely to stand from left, right and centre along with the usual rag-tag of animal rights activists, monarchists, Frexiteers and greens. But this will be narrowed down in the second round of voting, mostly to a choice between candidates loyal to re-elected president Macron, and more radical insurgents from the left or right.

Can anyone stop Emmanuel Macron?

If they weren’t insufficiently weary of politicians, the French will be invited to vote all over again for the Assemblée Nationale, the nation’s parliament, on 12 and 19 June. Citizen lassitude notwithstanding, the election may produce a louder, if not assuredly more effective, opposition to the prolongated reign of the second Sun King, the newly reelected President Emmanuel Macron. When fresh-faced Macron was first elected in 2017 in a stonking landslide, his portmanteau political movement, La République En Marche!, went on to win a commanding presidential majority in the National Assembly elections that followed. This bloc of deputies has loyally enabled Macron ever since – though the deputies themselves have proved a motley crew, one of them was caught last week buying lingerie with her parliamentary credit card.

The French have voted for the lesser of two evils

Few scenes of jubilation as Emmanuel Macron was re-elected President. French voters held their noses and voted without evident enthusiasm for five more years. French exit predictions, based on actual voting, not exit polls, are invariably lethally on target. As the polls closed they forecast 57.6 per cent for Macron, 42.4 per cent for Marine Le Pen. The official result will be certified on Tuesday but there’s no doubt. We were supposed to pretend that we didn’t know who had won the French presidential election until after 8 p.m. when the polls closed in the bigger cities. But the French exit predictions are fast and accurate so the Tweets and WhatsApps were coded: Poudré 54-58 per cent. Cat Woman 42-46 per cent.

Is this the end of Marine Le Pen?

Spectator Out Loud

Jonathan Miller, Cindy Yu and Laura Freeman

21 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Jonathan Miller, Cindy Yu and Laura Freeman

21 min listen

On this week's episode, Jonathan Miller says that whoever wins France's election on Sunday, the country is going to the dogs. (01:00) After, Cindy Yu says that China's online censors are struggling to suppress critics of the Shanghai lockdown. (07:47) And, to finish, Laura Freeman reviews a Walt Disney exhibition at the Wallace Collection. (12:06)Entries for this year's Innovator Awards, sponsored by Investec, are now open. To apply, go to: www.spectator.co.uk/innovator

Narcissist vs fantasist: France’s gruesome choice

Something strange is happening in advanced western democracies. In America and France, voters keep finding themselves choosing between candidates for whom they have very little affection. In America, we saw Clinton vs Trump, followed by Biden vs Trump. And in France this week, we have Macron vs Le Pen again. As many French voters now say, this is a choice between la peste (plague) et le choléra. Emmanuel Macron is disliked: arrogant and narcissistic to the point where he has compared himself to Jupiter, king of the gods. He has spent five years insulting and patronising voters and delivering mediocre results. His management of the epidemic was repressive and absurdist. He failed in Africa, failed with Putin, threw tantrums over Australia and Brexit.

Macron vs Le Pen debate: le verdict

Who won Wednesday night’s debate between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen depends on who is doing the scoring. In the spin room and on the social networks, Team Macron claimed a victory for the President. With the second round of the presidential election on Sunday, my reaction is exactly the opposite. Le Pen was not crushed as she was in 2017. In a way, she won by not being terrible, leaving Macron unable to administer a coup de grace to her candidacy. She got stronger and more confident as the evening wore on; he seemed to become more defensive. To be generous, Macron was not on form. As the three-hour debate began, his voice seemed almost to break as he described his ambition for France. Sincerity? Or the bravado performance? It was a strangely emotional beginning.

French election: Macron has been weakened

The polls have closed in France and projections show President Macron on 28.5 per cent with the rightist Marine Le Pen on 24.6 per cent. The ultra-leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon is in third place on 20.3 per cent and is thus eliminated from round two on 24 April. The result looks dangerous for Macron. The nationalist right has never been so close to power. The President will now attempt to assemble a ‘Republican Front’ against Le Pen. He’s got what he always wanted: Le Pen as his opponent in the second round. But the result shows that his support is narrow. The rest of the field is distant. A cold shower for Valérie Pécresse on 4.8 per cent, candidate of the Républicans; humiliation for Anne Hidalgo, a miserable 1.

The mysteries and rituals of French democracy

Coffee House Shots

Is Macron in for a surprise?

14 min listen

Coffee House Shots

Is Macron in for a surprise?

14 min listen

Ahead of the first round of France's presidential elections on Sunday, Katy Balls asks whether Emmanuel Macron will be able to justify his apparent distance from the campaign trail. Taking part in the discussion with Katy Balls are Spectator contributor Jonathan Miller, Georgina Wright, from Institute Montaigne, and The Spectator's data journalist Michael Simmons.

Why Macron’s poll lead is dwindling

With eight days to go before the first round of voting in the French presidential election, Emmanuel Macron has just had his worst polling so far. The new numbers show that in the second round of voting, presumed to pit Macron against Marine Le Pen just as in 2017, the president has a lead of only six points (53 per cent to 47 per cent). He famously crushed her 66 per cent to 34 per cent five years ago. Macron has tried to stay aloof from the presidential campaign and position himself instead as the senior European political leader in the Ukraine crisis. His efforts have been clumsy. He’s fired the head of military intelligence for delivering the assessment that Russia was completely incapable of overrunning Ukraine – so would not try.

‘McKinseygate’ won’t bring down Macron

We are in the final stretch before the first round of voting in the French presidential election on 10 April and Macron is still cruising to victory — though perhaps not quite as serenely as he had hoped. ‘McKinseygate’ is the latest scandal that probably won’t change much. Six million fonctionnaires being apparently insufficient to govern France, it transpires that Macron’s government has paid €2.4 billion (£2 billion) to consultants including McKinsey mainly to tell it what to do about Covid. Doubtless a mere bagatelle when the bill is finally totalled for the plague, but embarrassing. As anyone familiar with McKinsey could have predicted, the laptop geniuses turned France into an absurdist dystopia — a society in which it was necessary to fill out a form to take the dog for a walk, legal to buy liquor, a crime to buy clothes for children.

The strange case of the oligarch and the French vineyard

Fancy a dabble in the wine business, at a knock-down price? The Prieuré of Saint Jean de Bébian, a trophy asset owned by a sanctioned Russian oligarch, is set amidst 32 majestic hectares of artfully tended vines nestled in a beautiful corner of southern France. A brand-new climate-controlled production hall has all the mod cons. There’s even a Michelin-starred restaurant on the premises where you might entertain clients. A château within a walled park in a nearby village may be available by separate negotiation. And it’s just 20 minutes away from Béziers airport where you can land your jet. On the outskirts of Pézenas, a market town in the Hérault valley, Bébian has since 2008 been the property of the Russian oligarch, Dmitry Aleksandrovich Pumpyansky, although more recently it’s revealed apparently to also be owned by his son, Alexander, 35.

The Macron Paradox

With just 24 days to go before the first round of French presidential voting, the political landscape has become borderline surreal, a dream state of self-induced hallucinations. The war in Ukraine has utterly overshadowed the vote. Any resemblance to an actual democratic contest might now be regarded as coincidental. If the current polls are right, Macron will enter the second round with Marine Le Pen in a straight replay of 2017, with the same inevitable result. I have my doubts about these polls. But it might not matter much who faces Macron: unloved yet unbeatable. Macron isn’t even campaigning. He’s at 30 per cent in polls for the first round, campaigning through a torrential downpour of electoral bribes.

Macron appears unassailable

Emmanuel Macron, the President of France for whom few voters have expressed much affection, is suddenly the leader of a nation (and by dint of his presidency of the European Council, the EU) in a de facto state of economic war with Russia. He is wiping the floor with his opponents in the forthcoming presidential election, benefiting from the congruence of international events and his refusal to descend into the electoral arena. With 38 days to go before the first round of voting, the oxygen has been sucked out of the campaign. Macron’s efforts to diplomatically defuse the Ukraine crisis plainly failed – yet his approval ratings have skyrocketed, to over 50 per cent in one poll yesterday. His opposition is in danger of being reduced to a state of near irrelevance.

Macron’s posturing as a global statesman will get him re-elected

It is bordering on tasteless amidst the horror of war in Europe to question the political impact of the conflict on the first round of the French presidential election in 44 days. But it’s naïve to imagine that such thoughts are not occurring to the politicians themselves, not least Emmanuel Macron. As I write this on Friday, Macron has still to declare his candidacy for the presidency. He’s been letting his opponents on the right and left fight it out amongst themselves for as long as possible. He could declare tomorrow at the Salon d’Agriculture, where he is scheduled to make the customary presidential appearance. Or maybe not. Macron has preferred to campaign as president, not candidate, and the war gives him an ideal opportunity to divert attention from his presidential record, which isn’t great.

Macron’s diplomatic failure in Russia was still a political success

President Emmanuel Macron may or may not have imagined that his mission to Moscow would head off armed conflict in Ukraine. He will nevertheless have calculated that while his mission was an abject diplomatic failure, it was a modest political success. The French pro-Macron media (most of it) bigged up the visit as a triumph of French diplomacy and an affirmation of Macron’s global stature. Plus, all the jetting back and forth gave the President an excuse to further delay announcing his candidacy for the presidential election, the first round of which is in just 47 days. He might have failed to stop Putin’s aggression, but at least he was seen trying. That the deal he claimed with Putin was imaginary wasn’t really important.

Friday

Monday

Thursday

Wednesday

Monday

Monday

Friday

Thursday

Thursday

Wednesday

Thursday

Monday

Sunday

Wednesday

Sunday

Saturday

Thursday

Wednesday

Sunday

Saturday

Saturday

Thursday

Saturday

Thursday

Thursday

Friday

Tuesday