London and Paris have lots in common really

Chancellor Angela Merkel (right) and President Emmanuel Macron (left) are seeking to consolidate a relationship at the heart of the EU by strenuously inventing traditions of “l’amité, ” but this doesn’t alter the real dynamics.

THE British and the French form “un couple infernal.” The two nations coexist in close geographical proximity and are bound together by a long history of affection and aversion.

The aversion part is more widely noticed than the mutual respect. A 1980s TV sketch, featuring the comic Rowan Atkinson, showed him wearing a black beret and striped Maillot top and declaring, “We haven’t forgotten Agincourt or the Eurovision Song Contest.”

The same jokes would land today because a tetchy sense of mutual misunderstanding is vital to the Anglo-French relationship.