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Brexit, Bayeux and bankers — how May and Macron match up

Entente Cordiale: Emmanuel Macron will meet the Prime Minister: AFP/Getty Images
Entente Cordiale: Emmanuel Macron will meet the Prime Minister: AFP/Getty Images

Theresa May will be practising her bonjours today in anticipation of the arrival of France’s suave President Macron for their first summit tomorrow.

It’s being held at Sandhurst military academy, eight months after he ascended to the top job. Will it be a British show of force, or will the French bring out the big guns? And how will May and Macron, as different as cheddar and Camembert, get along?

Here’s how they’ve been doing so far on style and substance.

Style council

Mrs May is a fan of Vivienne Westwood but where she and Macron might have a talking point is leather trousers. The PM wore a £995 pair for a Sunday Times photoshoot last year, to much derision. Brigitte, the 64-year-old Mrs Macron, wears her skin-tight leathers to applause.

Macron has also learned to ditch the expensive clothes. He used to parade around in silk-lined pinstripe Lagonda suits, which would go unremarked upon in his former role as a Rothschild banker, but on the Presidential campaign trail he toned it down with suits stitched for him by a traditional Parisian tailor.

The present tense

May should probably not follow the path of Margaret Thatcher who, on being invited to the 200th anniversary celebrations of the French Revolution, gave President Mitterand a first edition of Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, describing the savagery in Paris under the Regime of Terror compared with prosperous London. Perhaps instead a copy of Gustav Holst’s Planets Suite, which includes the swells of the Jupiter movement. President Macron has reportedly styled himself as an aloof “Jupiter” since stepping into the Elysée Palace.

France could trump that with the proposed loan of the Bayeux Tapestry to the UK, the first time in its 950-year history. Of course, some might see this as a well-aimed arrow from President Macron. It depicts King Harold’s defeat at the hands of the Normans in 1066, who made French the official language of the English court.

If the two want to exchange a secret giggle, a rare hard copy of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury would do the trick.

Popularity contest

Macron took a dive in popularity this summer after his programme of tax cuts and reform of the labour market irritated his electorate. He was skating on 40 per cent in the approval ratings and facing an autumn of strikes. But not much came of it and by December he’d bounced back to a healthy 52 per cent. There was a little upwards blip up in Mrs May’s popularity after her cough-and-letter strewn Tory Conference speech, in a rare show of sympathy from the public. But since then it has gone south. In December, after the Westminster sex scandals and Cabinet Brexit wars, she recorded her lowest approval rating, down to a mere 32 per cent.

The Donald factor

May rushed to Washington to be the first world leader to meet the new US President, and held his hand going down a ramp. The early promise of a state visit to the UK keeps getting kicked further up the road, and since the US President retweeted a Britain First rant and snubbed the US Embassy opening, our relationship status is changing from “special” to “it’s complicated”.

President Macron has also held Donald Trump’s hand, in that handshake wrestle when the US President was invited for the Bastille Day celebrations in July. Trump, an admirer of Versailles-style furnishings, and the power of kings, may not have picked up the implications of the invitation.

Banking on success

Macron promised, while finance minister, to roll out the red carpet for British bankers. After Brexit, Paris launched a bid to win over the European Banking Authority from London with a prospectus that included the curious claim that “three out of five Parisians speak good English”. Paris triumphed over Dublin and Frankfurt in November.

May, meanwhile, had been reluctant to meet with bankers, or was until they started threatening to take the jobs currently deposited in London and move them over to the EU.

The immigration question

Macron will be pushing for the UK to currently take more child refugees — we’ve managed around 300, not the 3,000 originally promised.

Meanwhile, over in France, they’ve hit 100,000 asylum applications this year and the far-Right, galvanised by Marine Le Pen, is getting restless. Macron, visiting Calais on Tuesday, gave a robust defence of French borders, ahead of a tough immigration and asylum bill in February, which he describes as “humanity with a firm hand”.

Happy holidays

In his Sorbonne speech last year Macron suggested all students in the EU should spend six months in another EU country — a semi-compulsory gap year. Meanwhile, Theresa May used her walking holiday to come up with the idea of holding a general election.