French Fancies?

Emmanuel Macron's virility was not exactly asserted overnight between Saturday and Sunday, when France staged a thankfully failed attempt at a coup in Burkina Faso in order to thwart its emerging unity with Mali and Niger as the Alliance of Sahel States. Time was when such an intervention would have been a formality.

Yet not even Macron would countenance giving Mayotte to the Comoros at all, never mind against the wishes of its people. But last night's Lords defeats over the Chagos Islands will be reversed in the Commons, and that despite the specific Labour manifesto commitment to protect the interests of the British Overseas Territories. Those Ukrainians must have been setting fires to make up for having failed to experience any sensation directly from Keir Starmer.

Whatever guidance Starmer and Bridget Phillipson ended up publishing, the Supreme Court would confirm that that was exactly what it had meant. When he has not been supporting David Lammy's attacks on trial by jury and on the right of appeal, then Lord Sumption has been trying to tell you that the Court had permitted separate facilities on the basis of biological sex, but had not required them.

Already, if you sued in Starmer's Britain over a false assertion that you were a transsexual, then you would probably lose on the grounds that it was not defamatory. Indeed, you would be taking a major professional and, where applicable, political risk by suggesting that it might be. But in Macron's France, it is downright criminal, as everyone cheering on Brigitte Macron, including against Candace Owens when the time came, must believe that it should be everywhere. Think on.