What’s happened to the French? Ok, they’ve never been ‘nice’ in any way, we wouldn’t expect that, barely even ‘decent’ in most cases. But they’ve always been good at certain other things, other than nastiness, snooty attitudes, surrendering, misplaced sense of superiority and winning the odd World Cup. They have always been obsessive bureaucrats, which is why that’s a French world. They invented it. And along with bureaucracy comes organisational expectations, the basic structure behind the obsessive demands.

And yet twice in a very short time, the French have shown all the organisational skills of Norman Wisdom. All the logical, box-ticking thoroughness of Joey.

First was this year’s Champions League final fiasco. In which the most shambolic lack of preparation resulted in Liverpool fans going through hell, being herded, locked outside the ground, sprayed with tear-gas and abused. And the authorities in Paris had the outright chutzpah to blame those Liverpool fans. Who, it must be said, are not without their history, but in this instance were completely innocent. The ‘inquiry’ later exonerated the fans and accepted responsibility… ish. In a very French way. Je regret rien. And it all stems from cowardice. They were so prepared for Liverpool fans to behave… well, like Liverpool fans in Europe, that they totally over-reacted when they didn’t. And basically ‘pulled the trigger’ at the first line of ‘vous jamais marchez seuls’.

Then yesterday was ‘Tossergate deux’. The schools broke up so all those children got systematically loaded into the back of VW Sharans, given an iPad, a juice box and a colouring book, for the trip down to Dover. To France!!! To Holiday!!!

That was the plan. Because in the remains of our European membership, we have French customs over here, in Dover. So you check onto your ferry and when you arrive in Calais to visit the refugee centres, you can just drive away. And yesterday morning, arguably the first day of the busiest holiday weekend of the year, instead of having the 14 French border guards there to find undesirables, aliens and terrorists, there were only 6. The other 8 were still in bed with their mistresses, eating croissants or surrendering to some unseen army. A situation which caused 8 hour delays. By which time, the iPads had run out of charge, the colouring books completed and the juice boxes long empty, most into the back of the car along with a few wee-wees and other undesirable stuff.

So we need to know what’s the French for ‘couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery’. Because it would appear that under Macron’s leadership, they actually couldn’t.

Happy Samedi

A xxxx