QUENTIN LETTS: The more Napoleon burbled on, the more you understood why his wife whacked him
The French president marked the end of his state visit to Britain with a news conference at Northwood military HQ, Herts. At his side stood Sir Keir Starmer, playing the role of spare part. The nasal knight has seldom looked so potatoey.
All eyes were on Napoleon, which is just how he likes it. He was dressed in a waistcoat – odd for such a hot day – and his hairdo had been tweezered to the left, presumably to disguise a bald spot. Unless a patch of fur had been ripped out by Brigitte.
He kept tilting his head to make sure we could admire his long sideburns. A good inch longer than Sir Keir's, they were.
The rough format was as follows: our old pudding gave stubby answers, biting on his lower lip and telling us what a 'serious' fellow he was. Sir Keir's voice becomes plainer by the week. What a lustreless blob he is. He kept looking over to Macron in affection or envy.
Then the floor was given to the mighty midget, his blue eyes suddenly dazzling like BMW headlights. Off he went, juddering his chin in an imperious manner, shoulders twitching a little as he was energised by the attention.
These answers, as long as speeches in a Racine tragedy, were relayed by a simultaneous translation chap who sounded less like a Man of Destiny and more like an accountant from Penge.
Macron was burbling forth about the European pillars of Nato, pragmatic roadmaps, the wickedness of demagoguery and so forth, while Brian the translator, or whatever his name was, made it sound wonderfully mundane. M Macron hogged the airtime. He was elliptical, which is to say incomprehensible, his answers full of abstract concepts. But one thing became clear: he was obsessed with Brexit.
The longer the press conference lasted, the more he attacked Brexit, each time with greater vigour, almost until one of his eyelids started quivering and a tic developed in his cheeks, Herbert Lom-style.
He raged that Brexit had made everything worse. Brexit had been ruinous to trade. Quite how that tallied with his boast that Anglo-French trade was now higher than it was when we were in the European Union, it was hard to say. On small boats and illegal immigration, 'the British people were sold a lie that Europe was the trouble!'
And yet, and yet, Belgium has been rather brilliant at stopping small boats. Much better than France.
Maybe the problem with the small-boats crisis has not been 'Europe' but 'Macron' – and all because our bolt for freedom left him with fewer opportunities to meddle in our affairs.
Questions from the media were opened by our own Monsieur Chatty, ITV's Robert Peston, a man whose bulletin intros and upsums can be divided into several chapters, complete with index and footnotes. This time, in fact, he did rather well, and even spoke French, noting that France had pocketed '700 million livres' of our money to do beggar all about stopping those inflatables.
Peston also observed that M Macron and Sir Keir were members of 'a slightly beleaguered class of centrist leaders' and he wondered if they were exchanging tips on how to survive.
This was intended as a playful remark but they both became distinctly huffy about it. Sir Keir pushed out a pouty lip and complained that it was 'really important to show that social democracy has the answers'.
As for Macron, he flew into an impenetrable riff about how his political philosophy was based on science rather than things such as… Just as he was going to say the B word, a male orderly stepped in, jabbed him in the derriere with a large sedative and sewed him into a white straitjacket, to be flown back to his home country where he is such an overwhelming failure.
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