Mon Dieu!

France seems to be going through a period of rather bad karma, starting perhaps with the Notre Dame fire. At least that has been restored. The latest episode was the theft of the French crown jewels from the Louvre, and you’d think that as the building started off as a fortress they may have been better protected. In between the fire and the theft we’ve witnessed Macron’s misplacing his parliamentary majority and subsequent exits of various prime ministers, and the slightly surreal sight of former president Sarkozy sauntering down a street to start a five-year prison sentence for illicit election funding offences. Where’s Victor Hugo when you need him? I’m struggling to find much merit in the wonders of ‘meritocracy’ which I thought was what our system  was supposedly good at delivering. At least there is merit in a judicial system which is capable of punishing those at the top of the political greasy pole. Of course, soliciting money from Col. Ghaddafi is on a quite different scale to soliciting your attire from a member of the House of Lords. That’s not illegal. But generally in the UK money in politics is not a subject that gets much judicial attention. I’ve wondered off the subject of France a bit there. Here’s a joke (!) made by Margaret Thatcher (!) recorded by Roy Jenkins in a meeting from his days as President of the then EEC Commission (circa 1980):
 
‘She then suddenly swept into a fantasy about taking the Crown jewels with her on a forthcoming trip to Paris and using them to soften Giscard, who was temporarily immersed in the Bokassa diamonds scandal.* It was a good taste-bad taste joke, but as with many people who have made one she immediately backtracked.’ (Roy Jenkins: A Life At The Centre, Macmillan, 1991 p.496)
 
*It was alleged that President Giscard D’Estang had received a couple of diamonds from President Bokassa of the Central African Republic, sold them and kept the proceeds.
 
So, now that Macron is to lend us some old tapestry or other, perhaps we could lend him our Crown Jewels? It seems some French people believe he is their emperor after all.