France and the UK have long had a complicated relationship – but over the course of this past year, it’s appeared to reach a new low. A verbal spat that began when the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, told the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to “prenez un grip” and “donnez-moi un break” took a turn for the worse after Macron privately called Johnson “a clown”. As the former French ambassador to the UK put it, relations are now the worst they’ve been since Waterloo.
Over the weekend, after Britain’s Brexit minister, David Frost, resigned, the French government urged the UK to use his departure as an opportunity to reset and rebuild trust with both France and the EU. And as the refugee crisis demonstrates, the stakes couldn’t be much higher. When 27 people drowned in the Channel in November, British and French officials were all too swift to vocally cast blame on one another instead of looking for constructive solutions.
But behind the scenes, are there reasons to hope that diplomacy will prevail? Patrick Wintour, the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, and Angelique Chrisafis, the Guardian’s Paris correspondent, have been watching the relationship unravel from opposite sides of the Channel. They tell Nosheen Iqbal that what seemed to start as a rift over Brexit negotiations has grown into a crisis with serious humanitarian implications.
Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
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