What row?, interview with the Guardian, 06.03.03

What row?

With Anglo-French relations as strained as they have been at any time in the past 100 years, these must be difficult days for their diplomats. But will the two countries’ ambassadors say anything at all undiplomatic? Andy Beckett visits Monsieur l’Ambassadeur in London, while Jon Henley drops in on His Excellency in Paris

Thursday March 6, 2003

Guardian

Their man in London High up on the facade of the French embassy in London, there is a large commemorative stone plaque. Its inscription, like the embassy’s grand cream lines, has been dulled a little by decades of British weather and dirt, but the wording is legible enough. It celebrates the Entente Cordiale of 1904, the treaty commonly held to have ended the centuries of hostility between the two countries, and to have replaced it with cooperation in war and peace alike. Next year is the Entente’s centenary. The French ambassador Gérard Errera, with an expansive flourish of his slim, elegant hands, says that ceremonies in London and Paris involving both heads of state are being planned. "This relationship has a history," he continues. "It has a cement. We have many things in common." As he tends to after saying something high-minded, he looks out of his office window: onto Hyde Park, and the spring sunshine flickering on the daffodils. For a moment, his job seems infinitely comfortable.

In recent weeks, however, it has become less so. Ever since, as he puts it, "some differences on Iraq" arose between Britain and France, some of the British press has had undiplomatic things to say about the conduct of the French government and about France in general. The French representatives at the United Nations have been denounced as "wreckers" by the Daily Mail. President Chirac has been described by the Daily Telegraph as "an over-the-hill Gaullist bedevilled by corruption scandals", and by the Sun, more pithily, as "Le Worm". The Mail has printed anti-French jokes ("What do you call a Frenchman advancing on Baghdad? A salesman."). The Sun has distributed a special anti-Chirac edition, complete with worm illustration, to surprised Parisian pedestrians, and has attempted to deliver a white feather to Errera, carried by someone wearing a chicken costume.

Fortunately for the ambassador, the chicken went to the wrong address: the French consulate down the road. But it is not hard to see a significance in all this pantomime. Similar campaigns against Germany and Russia, who are also opposing Britain and America over Iraq, have been conspicuous by their absence. And the current anti-French polemic closely echoes recent British tantrums over the refusal of France to import British beef, the controversial facilities for asylum seekers at Sangatte, and half a dozen other periods of friction.

Errera became ambassador last September, not many months after his predecessor was accused by the Telegraph of calling Israel a "shitty little country" at a London party, a version of events strongly disputed by the French government. Yet, at least at first, Errera describes French relations with the British press in bracing, benign terms. "It’s always enjoyable to debate, to defend positions, to express convictions," he says. A suspicion of a smile crosses his long, calm face. "To have democratic friendly dialogue."

He has been a diplomat for 34 years, in Brussels, in Geneva, in Washington and Madrid. He has visited India during periods of tension with Pakistan to discuss the region’s nuclear weapons. Sitting upright and immaculate in his office, with acres of carpet around him and his hands lightly resting on what look like pharaoh’s heads carved into the arms of his chair, he says with slow emphasis, "We are very serene. We are very determined. We are not posturing [over Iraq]."

Does he mind seeing his president portrayed as a worm? "If people prefer to hurl insults…" He waves a hand dismissively. "If your arguments are strong, you do not need to resort to insults." Errera fluently changes the subject to the recent agreements concluded between Britain and France over beef and Sangatte, to the countries’ closeness as "European partners" and combatants against international terrorism. "What unites us is much more important than what divides us," he says. "We [the French] have always thought that to be an ally means telling the truth, especially when you disagree. Otherwise it is not an alliance. But do we have a different vision of the world? No."

Behind his desk there is an enormous framed photograph of De Gaulle inspecting Free French troops in London during the second world war. A little eagerly, Errera volunteers the name of the square where the parade took place. "I don’t mind if you mention that I have this picture," he adds. He points out that France has contributed soldiers to many of the same military operations as Britain in recent years. Why then do many Britons continue to see the French as feeble warriors? Errera waves a hand again. "To caricature is always easier than to see the realities."

Gradually, though, it becomes clear that some of this year’s insults have struck a nerve. When I ask about the visit of the Sun’s chicken, the ambassador blows out his cheeks. "I don’t remember," he says. Then, after a pause, he says, "It went to the wrong address," before speaking in animated French to the press officer sitting across from him. At the mention of the Sun’s Parisian edition, Errera turns grave: "That was not taken as a joke. It was taken as offensive. We try to like another kind of British humour."

The problem with seeing all this as just another passing Anglo-French squall, as Errera says it is, is the greater seriousness of the issue this time. The distance between Britain and France over Iraq, a place where both countries have long had rival commercial and strategic interests, and over the global order as a whole is obvious even when Errera steers the conversation on to the seemingly safer ground of generalisations about international relations. "The rule of law is the only way to build an organised, civilised, international society," he says, looking at the Hyde Park daffodils. "Nobody expects dictators to abide by the rule of law, but everybody expects democracies to be faithful to the basic values on which they are founded." The sentiments may be admirable, but their implied criticism of the Bush administration puts Errera completely out of step with America’s powerful cheerleaders in the British government and media.

He insists that he finds the British government "as friendly and straightforward as can be". But last week, in the middle of the Sun’s anti-French campaign, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and several other senior Labour figures took time out to attend a leaving party for the paper’s last editor. Earlier this year, the American press was full of attacks on Chirac and the French national character identical, except for questions of transatlantic syntax, to those being printed by British papers. The Anglo-French relationship, it seems, has been trumped by the Anglo-American one and by the one between New Labour and the rightwing press.

Yet the modern closeness of Britain and France is probably both more and less substantial than is generally supposed. More, because Britons - even Sun readers - will go on buying French barns however many white feathers their paper sends to Errera. Less, because even the Entente Cordiale, on closer inspection, looks less like a statement of cross-channel solidarity than a nervy Edwardian colonial treaty to divide up North Africa.

These more ambiguous diplomatic and cultural currents will be there beneath the surface whatever happens in Iraq. When I ask Errera how his job may be affected by the outbreak of war in Iraq, he raises his hands and slowly, inscrutably, turns his palms outwards. "Let’s wait," he says. "Let’s not speculate." And then he looks back at the daffodils.