Given the delicate state of the Brexit negotiations, the last thing that the Government needed was to have a political aide, Julia Dockerill, wandering around Downing Street brandishing the notes of a top-secret meeting.
But that, of course, is what happened on Monday, leaving Westminster agog at the revelation the Government’s model for Brexit is to ‘have cake and eat it’.
This was the cue for all sorts of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Europhiles, although having a cake and eating it sounds pretty much ideal to me. But the words that really jumped out at me were rather less cheerful: ‘French likely to be most difficult.’
Envy and hatred of the British are at the heart of the French identity: DOMINIC SANDBROOK on why that secret Tory briefing paper was right to predict France would be the most bloody-minded opponent of Brexit
By Dominic Sandbrook for the Daily Mail
30 November 2016
Julia Dockerill (pictured) was spotted carrying a notebook which went into great detail about how the 'French likely to be most difficult'
Given the delicate state of the Brexit negotiations, the last thing that the Government needed was to have a political aide, Julia Dockerill, wandering around Downing Street brandishing the notes of a top-secret meeting.
But that, of course, is what happened on Monday, leaving Westminster agog at the revelation the Government’s model for Brexit is to ‘have cake and eat it’.
This was the cue for all sorts of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Europhiles, although having a cake and eating it sounds pretty much ideal to me. But the words that really jumped out at me were rather less cheerful: ‘French likely to be most difficult.’
Although ministers spent yesterday hastily insisting the notes bore no relation to reality, I couldn’t help noticing that the difficulty of the French was something of a theme in Julia Dockerill’s notebook.
Indeed, virtually no other European country was mentioned at all, which surely tells its own story.
‘Very French negotiating team,’ she scribbled ominously at one point. And again, discussing the chances of a deal: ‘Manufacturing relatively straightforward. Services harder because French hoping for business.’
The remarkable thing about this, of course, is that nobody was at all surprised.
We all knew the French were likely to be the most implacable obstacle to a successful Brexit, and that they would try to use it to steal business from the City of London. The only surprise is that anybody saw the need to write it down.
Striking employees of the My Ferry Link company block the access to Calais harbour after setting tyres on fire. France is a beautiful, but troubled, country
Right from the early hours of June 24, when the referendum result became apparent, the French have cast themselves as our chief adversaries. In some ways, it pains me to write those words, because I studied French at university and lived for a time in the south of that beautiful, troubled, unhappy country. But it is true.
Which foreign leader, for example, insisted that the EU must pose a ‘threat’ to Britain, and that we must pay a ‘price’ for our effrontery?
None other than France’s President Hollande, whose leadership has been such a triumph that he currently basks in an approval rating of four percent.
Similarly, who demanded that the Brexit talks be conducted exclusively in French? Why, who else but the former French foreign minister Michel Barnier, a strident critic of Britain’s financial sector, who wangled a job as the EU’s chief negotiator. And which country placed adverts trying to lure major firms from London, and even promised them financial aid in resettling workers and handling their English files? Well, I’ll give you a clue — it wasn’t Germany.
But of course, it never would be Germany. For all the wartime stereotypes, most modern Germans are full of admiration for Britain, as they are always keen to tell you.
Julia Dockerill's notebook shows that Britain fears France's age-old cross-Channel enmity
The French are a very different matter, which is why I have not been at all surprised by their shamelessly hypocritical, cynical and self-interested conduct.
It is sometimes said that the French elite’s jealousy and resentment of all things Anglo-Saxon dates back to their behaviour in the Forties, when they abased themselves before the Nazi war machine and had to be liberated by the British and Americans.
In fact, I think the roots are a bit deeper. Ever since Napoleon’s bid for world power was ended by the British and the Germans at Waterloo, the French have been the whipping boys of the world powers.
Their culture, once the finest in Europe, has become a sleepy backwater. Their economy has become sclerotic and inflexible. Even their language, once the world’s lingua franca, has become a minority interest.
France never wanted us in the first place: Charles de Gaulle (pictured) twice vetoed Britian's membership
All this helps to explain why, as the Cambridge historian Robert Tombs wrote a few years ago in his brilliant book That Sweet Enemy, envy and hatred of the English is so deeply embedded at the core of French identity.
Many of our Gallic neighbours, if only unconsciously, have never forgiven us for Trafalgar and Waterloo, let alone for saving them in 1944.
Indeed, when a poll was carried out to mark the centenary of the entente cordiale in 2004, it transpired that the words the French most associate with us are ‘snobbish’, ‘cold’, ‘arrogant’ and, of course, ‘insular’. Nothing very cordiale about that!
It is this festering resentment, I think, that explains why the French were so keen to poison our relations with the newly formed Common Market from the very beginning.
President Hollande can moan all he likes about Britain’s supposed folly in leaving the EU, our arrogance in not considering ourselves European and all the rest of it. What he seems to forget, though, is that it was his predecessor, Charles de Gaulle, who vetoed our application to join in the Sixties — and not once, but twice.
Most commentators at the time agreed that de Gaulle had never forgiven Britain for bailing him out during World War II, and was itching to get one over on his former patron. He was reported to have said he wanted to see Britain enter the Common Market ‘stripped naked’ — and although he denied it, most people thought it rang true.
De Gaulle made no secret of his fundamental distrust of all things British. By ‘nature and structure and economic context’, he said, Britain was different from the rest of Europe. Hence his famous ‘non!’, which delayed our entry for ten years to 1973.
I sometimes wonder how different our history would be if de Gaulle had fallen under a protesting farmer’s tractor and we had, indeed, joined in 1963.
They have long memories: The French are still licking their wounds after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 (pictured)
Since Britain was then unquestionably the leading power in Europe, we would surely have dominated the Common Market in its crucial early years, and could have helped it to evolve into a leaner, less wasteful, more effective association, shorn of all its bureaucratic nonsense.
The French, of course, would not have liked that at all. Even now, they cling jealously to their privileges, such as the ridiculous gimmick of having a second European Parliament in Strasbourg and the corrupt charade of the Common Agricultural Policy, which accounts for 40 per cent of the EU budget and functions as a gigantic subsidy for French farmers.
In that respect, de Gaulle played his cards perfectly. By the time we joined, the Common Market was well on its way to becoming a French cartel. And with Britain’s self-confidence then at an all-time low, there was very little we could do about it.
Where de Gaulle led, though, other French leaders have followed. When Margaret Thatcher became our first woman prime minister in 1979, her French counterpart, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, treated her with snobbish condescension, to the point of ostentatiously leafing through a newspaper while she was talking at a European summit.
Jacques Chirac revelled in his reputation as the enemy of all things Anglo-Saxon. Nicolas Sarkozy threatened to move France’s migrant camps to the shores of southern England.
Francois Fillon, who could be the next French President, gets into a car in Paris. He may have a Welsh wife and be a fan of Margaret Thatcher but don't expect him to do Britain any favours
And although the current front-runner for the French presidential election in 2017, Francois Fillon, is a self-confessed Anglophile (and is married to a Welsh woman), I wonder whether, under the pressure of the election, he can resist the temptation to bash the British, in order to appeal to the notoriously chauvinistic voters of la France profonde.
So while Tory aide Miss Dockerill was reckless to wave her notes around for all the world to read, I am pleased to see that the Government is taking the French threat seriously.
For the past 1,000 years, our cross-Channel neighbours have been our greatest rivals — not just on the battlefield, but in everything from business and finance to culture and sport.
It was probably only a matter of time before they threw off the flimsy pretence of politeness and took up their battered old Napoleonic swords.
Once again, this is a battle we cannot afford to lose.
But we should not shrink from the challenge. We should welcome it. For as history shows, when the French and the British lock horns in earnest, there is usually only one outcome.
But that, of course, is what happened on Monday, leaving Westminster agog at the revelation the Government’s model for Brexit is to ‘have cake and eat it’.
This was the cue for all sorts of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Europhiles, although having a cake and eating it sounds pretty much ideal to me. But the words that really jumped out at me were rather less cheerful: ‘French likely to be most difficult.’
Envy and hatred of the British are at the heart of the French identity: DOMINIC SANDBROOK on why that secret Tory briefing paper was right to predict France would be the most bloody-minded opponent of Brexit
By Dominic Sandbrook for the Daily Mail
30 November 2016
Julia Dockerill (pictured) was spotted carrying a notebook which went into great detail about how the 'French likely to be most difficult'
Given the delicate state of the Brexit negotiations, the last thing that the Government needed was to have a political aide, Julia Dockerill, wandering around Downing Street brandishing the notes of a top-secret meeting.
But that, of course, is what happened on Monday, leaving Westminster agog at the revelation the Government’s model for Brexit is to ‘have cake and eat it’.
This was the cue for all sorts of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Europhiles, although having a cake and eating it sounds pretty much ideal to me. But the words that really jumped out at me were rather less cheerful: ‘French likely to be most difficult.’
Although ministers spent yesterday hastily insisting the notes bore no relation to reality, I couldn’t help noticing that the difficulty of the French was something of a theme in Julia Dockerill’s notebook.
Indeed, virtually no other European country was mentioned at all, which surely tells its own story.
‘Very French negotiating team,’ she scribbled ominously at one point. And again, discussing the chances of a deal: ‘Manufacturing relatively straightforward. Services harder because French hoping for business.’
The remarkable thing about this, of course, is that nobody was at all surprised.
We all knew the French were likely to be the most implacable obstacle to a successful Brexit, and that they would try to use it to steal business from the City of London. The only surprise is that anybody saw the need to write it down.
Striking employees of the My Ferry Link company block the access to Calais harbour after setting tyres on fire. France is a beautiful, but troubled, country
Right from the early hours of June 24, when the referendum result became apparent, the French have cast themselves as our chief adversaries. In some ways, it pains me to write those words, because I studied French at university and lived for a time in the south of that beautiful, troubled, unhappy country. But it is true.
Which foreign leader, for example, insisted that the EU must pose a ‘threat’ to Britain, and that we must pay a ‘price’ for our effrontery?
None other than France’s President Hollande, whose leadership has been such a triumph that he currently basks in an approval rating of four percent.
Similarly, who demanded that the Brexit talks be conducted exclusively in French? Why, who else but the former French foreign minister Michel Barnier, a strident critic of Britain’s financial sector, who wangled a job as the EU’s chief negotiator. And which country placed adverts trying to lure major firms from London, and even promised them financial aid in resettling workers and handling their English files? Well, I’ll give you a clue — it wasn’t Germany.
But of course, it never would be Germany. For all the wartime stereotypes, most modern Germans are full of admiration for Britain, as they are always keen to tell you.
Julia Dockerill's notebook shows that Britain fears France's age-old cross-Channel enmity
The French are a very different matter, which is why I have not been at all surprised by their shamelessly hypocritical, cynical and self-interested conduct.
It is sometimes said that the French elite’s jealousy and resentment of all things Anglo-Saxon dates back to their behaviour in the Forties, when they abased themselves before the Nazi war machine and had to be liberated by the British and Americans.
In fact, I think the roots are a bit deeper. Ever since Napoleon’s bid for world power was ended by the British and the Germans at Waterloo, the French have been the whipping boys of the world powers.
Their culture, once the finest in Europe, has become a sleepy backwater. Their economy has become sclerotic and inflexible. Even their language, once the world’s lingua franca, has become a minority interest.
France never wanted us in the first place: Charles de Gaulle (pictured) twice vetoed Britian's membership
All this helps to explain why, as the Cambridge historian Robert Tombs wrote a few years ago in his brilliant book That Sweet Enemy, envy and hatred of the English is so deeply embedded at the core of French identity.
Many of our Gallic neighbours, if only unconsciously, have never forgiven us for Trafalgar and Waterloo, let alone for saving them in 1944.
Indeed, when a poll was carried out to mark the centenary of the entente cordiale in 2004, it transpired that the words the French most associate with us are ‘snobbish’, ‘cold’, ‘arrogant’ and, of course, ‘insular’. Nothing very cordiale about that!
It is this festering resentment, I think, that explains why the French were so keen to poison our relations with the newly formed Common Market from the very beginning.
President Hollande can moan all he likes about Britain’s supposed folly in leaving the EU, our arrogance in not considering ourselves European and all the rest of it. What he seems to forget, though, is that it was his predecessor, Charles de Gaulle, who vetoed our application to join in the Sixties — and not once, but twice.
Most commentators at the time agreed that de Gaulle had never forgiven Britain for bailing him out during World War II, and was itching to get one over on his former patron. He was reported to have said he wanted to see Britain enter the Common Market ‘stripped naked’ — and although he denied it, most people thought it rang true.
De Gaulle made no secret of his fundamental distrust of all things British. By ‘nature and structure and economic context’, he said, Britain was different from the rest of Europe. Hence his famous ‘non!’, which delayed our entry for ten years to 1973.
I sometimes wonder how different our history would be if de Gaulle had fallen under a protesting farmer’s tractor and we had, indeed, joined in 1963.
They have long memories: The French are still licking their wounds after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 (pictured)
Since Britain was then unquestionably the leading power in Europe, we would surely have dominated the Common Market in its crucial early years, and could have helped it to evolve into a leaner, less wasteful, more effective association, shorn of all its bureaucratic nonsense.
The French, of course, would not have liked that at all. Even now, they cling jealously to their privileges, such as the ridiculous gimmick of having a second European Parliament in Strasbourg and the corrupt charade of the Common Agricultural Policy, which accounts for 40 per cent of the EU budget and functions as a gigantic subsidy for French farmers.
In that respect, de Gaulle played his cards perfectly. By the time we joined, the Common Market was well on its way to becoming a French cartel. And with Britain’s self-confidence then at an all-time low, there was very little we could do about it.
Where de Gaulle led, though, other French leaders have followed. When Margaret Thatcher became our first woman prime minister in 1979, her French counterpart, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, treated her with snobbish condescension, to the point of ostentatiously leafing through a newspaper while she was talking at a European summit.
Jacques Chirac revelled in his reputation as the enemy of all things Anglo-Saxon. Nicolas Sarkozy threatened to move France’s migrant camps to the shores of southern England.
Francois Fillon, who could be the next French President, gets into a car in Paris. He may have a Welsh wife and be a fan of Margaret Thatcher but don't expect him to do Britain any favours
And although the current front-runner for the French presidential election in 2017, Francois Fillon, is a self-confessed Anglophile (and is married to a Welsh woman), I wonder whether, under the pressure of the election, he can resist the temptation to bash the British, in order to appeal to the notoriously chauvinistic voters of la France profonde.
So while Tory aide Miss Dockerill was reckless to wave her notes around for all the world to read, I am pleased to see that the Government is taking the French threat seriously.
For the past 1,000 years, our cross-Channel neighbours have been our greatest rivals — not just on the battlefield, but in everything from business and finance to culture and sport.
It was probably only a matter of time before they threw off the flimsy pretence of politeness and took up their battered old Napoleonic swords.
Once again, this is a battle we cannot afford to lose.
But we should not shrink from the challenge. We should welcome it. For as history shows, when the French and the British lock horns in earnest, there is usually only one outcome.
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