Convenience Big Store: Time to be nicer to France?

4 September, 2021

Hello,

Here are a few more highlights from this week's issue of The Knowledge, now available on the website and the app. Android users can download the app here. If you'd like to have full access and read all our stories, subscribe here and get your first three months free.

All good wishes,

Jon Connell

Editor-in-chief

Europe

Ludovic Marin/Getty Images

Time to be nicer to France?

"Who would have thought it?" asks Le Monde. Emmanuel Macron is finally making sluggish old France an "anti-Covid champion". Eight months into our vaccine rollout, we're outstripping the UK, Germany, the US and even Israel. By the start of September, 50 million people had had at least a single jab. That's 75% of the population. To everyone's surprise, the president's "health pass" – a proof of vaccination needed for public spaces, introduced in July – has been a "spectacular" success. It riled the opposition, who said the French loved "la liberté" too much to endure this "health dictatorship". But vaccine coverage jumped from 55% to 70% in just over a month.

It's been a good few months for the Elysée, says Victor Mallet in the FT. In May, three months before Kabul fell to the Taliban, France began evacuating its friends and families from Afghanistan. About 620 people were flown to France in the weeks before the Afghan army collapsed, in addition to the 800 who were yanked out in 2014. France's foresight was initially put down to having better spies, but it was simply more shrewd at reading the data everyone else had. America was blinded by "wishful thinking" regarding the Afghan army's competence. Paris has also learnt from its failures against Islamists in the Sahel, often labelled "France's Afghanistan".

All of which is good reason for Britain to cosy up to France, says Stephen Bush in The Sunday Times. Afghanistan has awakened us to America's unreliability. Kabul, and the US's unilateral action there, carries echoes of the Suez crisis. The next president will either be "Trump or Trumpish", so Britain needs a new best friend, and the gulf between our PM and Macron is "smaller than it is sometimes in the interests of either side to pretend". Channel crossings are a shared interest and French and British security circles are "getting on like a house on fire", one official told me. Don't forget that in the past decade, France and the UK intervened without the US in Libya. The two countries are both involved in the Sahel and Mali, again without Uncle Sam.

That's wishful thinking, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in the Telegraph. The next president of France has a vested interest in painting Britain as "an easily defined bogeyman". If Macron wins in April 2022, he wants to style himself as "the next natural leader" of the EU, which will require some Britain-bashing. The unpredictable Marine Le Pen is "a woman whose party's mascot has been Joan of Arc from its creation". Both have "weaponised anti-Britishness". The only contender in the electoral race "neither vindictive nor imaginative" enough to play off Britain is Michel Barnier, the "ogre of Brexit", who threw his hat into the ring last week. You'll remember him for giving Theresa May headaches, but he's reasonable. Sadly, he elicits "boredom of catatonic proportions" among the French. At this stage, I'm afraid he's "the best you may get".

Eating in

TS Eliot's ode to English cheese

English cheese is not to be sniffed at, says John Smart in the literary magazine Slightly Foxed. In 1935 a Frenchman visiting London, Theodore Rousseau, was so impressed by the stuff that he wrote a letter to The Times. Why do the English not take more pride in their native dairy products, he lamented. If France had invented something as delicious as stilton, a statue would have been erected – as was the case for the creator of camembert, Marie Harel.

The response was spirited. Writer and magazine editor Sir John Squire "pounced on the complaint". Squire adored stilton ("this noble fragrant cheese, the cheese of poets") and seconded Rousseau's call for a statue. He was ready to start a fund and duly became chairman of the Stilton Memorial Committee.

TS Eliot wasn't so sure. The poet was a cheese-lover, but thought Squire was a hopeless reactionary. Still, he wrote in as well, praising Squire's "manly and spirited defence" of stilton. Wensleydale, he said, was better ("the Mozart of cheese"), but that was beside the point. "This is no time for disputes between eaters of English cheese. The situation is precarious and we must stick together." The stilton statue never happened, says Smart, but Rousseau, Squire and Eliot would be pleased with the state of British cheese today. Eighty years on, the industry is worth £615m.

Property

THE COUNTRY HOUSE You'll see rabbits, squirrels and deer from your sofa at Lakeland House, a stone's throw from the southern shore of Windermere. The four-bedroom house is set in 3.5 acres, with oak, beech and cherry trees that put on a blazing display in autumn. There's a separate two-bedroom lodge, a garage and a boat mooring nearby. £1.5m.

Desert Island Discs

The 81-year-old John Cleese will take on the topic of "cancel culture" in a forthcoming Channel 4 television series, John Cleese: Cancel Me. I've always thought conformity is "something to be very suspicious of", the Monty Python star told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs in 1997. Humour is about "anger, lust, envy, greed", says Cleese, who "stuck out" at 6ft by the time he was 12. It's about "attacking something". That's when it's funny. "You show me a sitcom about St Francis of Assisi and I'll show you a bummer."

In Life of Brian, the target was organised religion. In The Meaning of Life, Cleese wasn't so sure: "I did not think that we put the best material in… I suggested we should just give up." It's just as well he didn't get his way. He'd written a series of sketches about the Ayatollah Khomeini, "which really could not have been any more abusive and rude". They'd probably have resulted in "a fatwa".

One of the earliest Cleese cancellations was his family name. His father "was born Reginald Francis Cheese, but got fed up with the teasing". Cleese Sr had a sister "called Dorothy Cheese, who lived with us", so couldn't quite shake it. When people said "How strange you should have someone living in your house called Dorothy Cheese", his dad would reply: "Oh yes, extraordinary coincidence."

Listen to the episode here.

Love etc

Getty Images

I think divorce is sexy, says Kayla Kibbe in Inside Hook. "The days of divorce stigma are long gone" and having "a divorce or two under your belt" can be beneficial in the dating market. It shows you're at least capable of considering a long-term commitment.

It also proves a certain maturity and a willingness to make tough choices. Many single mothers prefer fathers who are dating after a divorce, because they understand the time and energy it takes to make a relationship work.

Finally, divorcés are more gregarious. "Marriage can keep you in a shell." The first step in your post-divorce life is to break out of it. And who doesn't want to be around for that?

Quoted

"Fact of the day. It takes Stefanos Tsitipas [sic] twice as long to go to the bathroom as it takes Jeff Bazos [sic] to fly into space. Interesting. 🚽 🚀"

Andy Murray after Tsitsipas took an eight-minute loo break during their US Open tennis match, which Murray lost