FRANCE UNITES BRITAIN!

For the first time in the build-up to action against Iraq, the newspapers of the Anglosphere are united in a blizzard of abuse against the French. In Paris, Le Monde has finally been obliged to translate Bart Simpson’s phrase that is now on everyone’s lips.

The French, say the mass-circulation papers in Britain and America, are nothing but “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (les primates capitulards toujours en quete de fromage), and, you know what, I couldn’t agree more. . . .

It does not mean the end of Nato. It does not even mean the end of the attempts to construct a Heath Robinson-style European “Common Foreign and Security Policy”. But are we really going to share a single constitution with France and Germany, of a kind now being drawn up by Giscard in Brussels? And will Blair really try to push that through without holding a referendum?

I am told that the Prime Minister is so keen on the euro that he was considering sacking the Chancellor in 2004, and holding it then. Has that ambition survived this week? Is Blair really still asking us to share a currency with this lot? Mangez mes culottes, as they are by now saying in Paris.

Er, only it’s Groundskeeper Willie, not Bart Simpson. The man ain’t got no culture. But it’s all right. . . .