20-05-2025
I've met the best candidate for Tory leader. Unfortunately, he is French
The best candidate the Tories could ever find to lead them out of their current slough of despond is a Frenchman you've never heard of. Unfortunately for them, he's just won himself the job here in France.
Bruno Retailleau, 64, the current Home Secretary in the wobbly Bayrou Cabinet, triumphed on Sunday with 75 per cent of the vote for leadership of Les Républicains, crushing his flashier rival Laurent Wauquiez, a former Sarkozy minister and top civil service mandarin, in what had been billed as a neck-to-neck race.
In an increasingly polarised (and messy) political landscape, Retailleau, the son of a grain dealer and Mayor of their small Vendée town, is the quiet man. He was an MP for two years, but a Senator for twenty: the French Upper House (which enjoys more powers than its British counterpart the House of Lords) is a less restless place, where compromise is the rule. Unlike Wauquiez – and Emmanuel Macron – Retailleau attended local Catholic schools, not grand Parisian Lycées and ENA. Also unlike them, he did his military service, in France's grandest cavalry regiment, at Saumur, once attended by General George Patton before WWI. He then progressed in local, then regional politics, almost under the radar even when he became one of the LR grandees.
In short, he is a type we'd almost forgotten existed: a soft-spoken grassroots politician, with traditional values and an interest in practical things, led by observation rather than ideology. He may be a classical liberal, yet in 2005 he (unsuccessfully) denounced Jacques Chirac's projected privatisation of the French motorway system, arguing that in the absence of actual competition, it would risklessly transfer state monopolies to private entities. (Two decades on, parliamentary and National Court of Audits reports have pointed out precisely the kind of unchecked profits private conglomerates then made from state-funded infrastructure). Retailleau also voted against the projected 2005 EU Constitution, as well as against its replacement, the Lisbon Treaty in 2006, which he viewed as encroaching on France's sovereignty.
Any Home Secretary is usually the target of the Left: the hoary accusation of 'racism' has been levelled against Retailleau when he criticised 'separatism', which in France refers to immigrant communities living in 'cultural bubbles' rather than trying to integrate in the wide French polity. He also riled the Mélenchonistas when said he would use 'every means' to 'reduce immigration' which he said 'doesn't benefit our country'. And after Suella Braverman and Giorgia Meloni, he, too wants to resettle illegal arrivals in third countries, negotiating with Iraq, Kazakhstan and Egypt.
It would be enough to make him the usual punching ball of the liberal classes, except that he says these things with unfailing politeness. Leftists have to pay attention to realise he's standing against everything they want to push.
As a result, Retailleau has become an acquired taste among many French voters who still have qualms about supporting Marine Le Pen or her youthful party president Jordan Bardella. That's not so much because they're Fascists (they're not) but because they're perceived as incompetent.
The selfie-taking screaming Bardella fans are highly visible, but the voting classes are mostly older. Their own self-respect may well lead them decide that a father of three who flat refused to appear with his young family on the cover of Paris Match (a rite of passage for presidential candidates) could be a blessed relief from the publicity-hungry crowd that noisily begged for their votes for decades, never to deliver on their promises.
