A Macron-Merkel Plot to 'Destroy' London?

The world has been so intrigued by the bizarre conduct of President Trump that far too little attention has been paid to the oddity of the French president. Mr Trump has been ridiculously intrusive in sharing his rapidly-changing views with the media and in the Twittersphere: M Macron has been tight-lipped to an unusual degree; and there have been many reports of his contempt for the media. He has been reported as saying - to his own staff - that there is no point in him giving interviews and press conferences because his intellect is so far superior to the norm that people simply will not understand his statements and his answers to questions. His path to office has been engineered by the old establishment of the 'higher schools', who experienced the agony of the Hollande regime and were determined to seize upon the national consensus that politics had reached a nadir. Thus they presented a new sort of candidate from a new generation: a man with few friends and a most peculiar private life. His allies engineered a parliamentary landslide, and he appears to be in an unassailable position with a clear popular mandate - to be 'different' - backed by a parliamentary majority.

With these assets, he is attempting - as half a dozen of his predecessors did - to attack the established position of the trade unions and of the farming interest, and to try to change the culture of work generally in France. Given the fact that recorded French 'productivity' is very much greater than the British, and not far inferior to the German, it is unclear why he thinks that such disruption is desirable or necessary; but he is having a go anyway: and it fills column inches in the press.

His career record includes a few years with a major international bank, where he greatly refined his spoken English and learned how far ahead of French practice in banking and finance are the systems in new York and London; and how much bigger are the financial markets in those centres - and in Singapore - than in Paris. He also gained a perspective an the depth of support that the London finance sector has, from a huge array of specialist lawyers and a raft of support professions such as actuaries, arbitrators, loss assessors and adjusters. Some English-speaking critics reckon that he has developed a profound envy of these markets, and that he came into office with a determination to push Paris as a rival to those centres even though the ancillary trades there are massively under-developed.

Doomsters in London have now come up with the idea that he has decided to use the Brexit opportunity to diminish London massively: and that he has enlisted Angela Merkel and the gnomes of Frankfurt to his plot. This is seen as the hidden agenda behind the determination of a loyal, ambitious and deeply egocentric Frenchman, Michel Barnier, to use his role as EU negotiator with the UK to delay and diminish whatever settlement the UK can achieve with the EU. This sort of conspiracy theory can be very powerful in times of massive uncertainty; and the absence of any such plot  - as with any negative argument in politics - is ultimately impossible to prove.

Mrs Merkel grew up, graduated and worked in the German Democratic Republic, and presumably had to learn Marxist dogma sufficiently to be allowed into university and into a research post. There is very little evidence that her education since 1990 has included any significant familiarisation with serious political economy. Her chancellorship has been supported by strong and well-informed ministers who have dealt with economic affairs and with business: she has read appropriate speeches, but no significant initiative has been attributed to her [other than the catastrophic decision to open Europe to mass immigration, which will mark her rule throughout future history]. It is possible, but improbable, that she has actually committed to any scheme systematically to attempt to smash the London market which - as is being stressed today - is an irreplaceable asset to world trade that even Germany and France rely upon heavily.

As a boy growing up in Lancashire, I became used to hearing older people say: "The French will never forgive us for saving them in two world wars", whereupon a minority said: "the First World War, yes: they don't like admitting that they needed us. But in the Second they hated us for disrupting their comfortable collaboration with the Nazis: remember, we bombed them and fought our way through France. DeGaulle was very much in a minority until the Americans put him in power."

It would be no surprise to discover that Macron grew up surrounded by the French mirror-image of such sentiments.

Aveva: Another Case Against British Policy

The technological software company Aveva is a very successful Cambridge spin-off company. Although in a different field of activity from ARM, it shares many similarities with the firm that Mrs May allowed to go to Japanese owners in her first days in office. These include the availability of talent and significant start-up funding in physical and intellectual proximity to Cambridge, and strongly competent management.

This company has become a world leader in an area where there is an almost-infinite global demand for their software, which provides a template for designing almost any process plant and the structures in which it can best operate. It is growing promisingly, and could probably have a great future on its own. However, a leading French company has decided that they way forward [regardless of Brexit] is to take Aveva over, then incorporate some of its operations into Aveva, and profit further.

There is no French university in the global big league: where Cambridge, Oxford and the leading London colleges are stars; so it makes sense for the intending French owners of Aveva - as with the Japanese owners of ARM - for the time being [at least] to maintain and even extend the operations and the investment at the Cambridge site. Cross-fertilisation and the simple buzz of social and physical proximity to talent are huge benefits that Britain gains from having top quality intellectual resources.

Even the dim politicians who are dawdling about the Brexit discussions, and balking at the inevitable decision that any sane leaders have to take, that Britain must remain within the European Economic Area must see, yet again, that Britain has huge resources of inventiveness that have for centuries been the country's greatest economic asset. Discussions about how far the UK can collaborate with EU institutions that will keep the UK in the closest contact with the intellectual developments forging ahead are a very important aspect of the whole Brexit debate. There are some signs that collaboration and the transfer of people between UK and continental universities are already being reduced by the irrational fears which people like Liam Fox and the 'hard Brexiteers' are unconsciously fostering in people who are concerned about their personal futures.

As with the concentration of intellectual and technical resources in insurance and banking in the City of London, so with the leading universities the concentration of technical and scientific talent in the British hubs is massively greater than anywhere on the continent. If the City or Cambridge University is weakened by any sort of boycott by the EU, it will not enable the French to build up Paris as a hub for finance, or Bonn or Bologna as a global technology giant: any spiteful weakening of British institutions will merely strengthen New York, Singapore and other non-EU business centres, and the great universities of the USA as foci for research. Specialist journalists have been making this point effectively over some years, but it has not yet spread into the wider public consciousness and has barely touched the limited wits of the political class. It would be hoped that the example of Aveva would enlighten them, but my expectations of those woodentops are extremely low.

Water off the Donald's Back

The pictures of yesterday's ceremonies in Paris feature two utterly bizarre couples. Wearing an almost-pristine Dior A-line dress of 1953, Melania Trump looked about the right age [but, certainly, not the right temperament] to be Mme Macron. Dressed for today, the real Mme Macron obviously made no positive impression on her near-contemporary, Donald Trump.

President Trump lapped up the limelight - it helped to correct the hassle he has been having at home - but it will be hard to find any evidence in the coming months that he actually feels any strong fellowship with a younger man who is trying to be monarchical while scrambling to assemble a sustainable government. Macron went home feeling that the day had been a success for French diplomacy: by the time Trump was in Air Force One the flattery had gone where the water goes off a duck's back. The net impact of the event was nil: except to reinforce the reflection in British minds that the French will never forgive the UK for saving them twice in the twentieth century. The French were thanking the US for entering the First World War in 1917, by which time hundreds of thousands of young Brits had been killed and wounded at the battle front in France.

Donald Trump is so used to apparent adulation from his TV audience, his minions in his patchily successful businesses, and the recent audiences at his campaigning rallies that he takes all such responses in the same way. He welcomes them, as reptiles welcome the warmth of the sun, because he needs them: but the impact of each day's intake is trivial in context of of the extent his previous experience. It has become apparent that he bridles - and twitters - at any critical comment that gets onto his radar; and this trait, too, seems now to have become ineradicable.

The progenitor of modern political campaigning in the United Kingdom, Benjamin Disraeli, was a magnet for criticism, much of it vitriolic. Some was easily turned aside as ignorantly antisemitic. For the more substantial venom of his many enemies [including much from his own party as he rose through the ranks] he had a well-studied display of contempt. He knew that success came to an outsider like himself by using his verbal facility and quick wit to pour flattery on those who could be useful to him. Once, when he was commended on this attribute, he responded on the lines of: "Everyone likes flattery; and with royalty I lay it on with a trowel". He showed the virtues of resilience and intelligence that have yet to be displayed by Macron, and which are apparently completely alien to Trump.

Another politician who combines indefeasible egocentricity with insensitivity to other people's opinions of him is Tony Blair. He has now imagined what shall happen to keep Britain in a 'reformed European Union'; or, perhaps, just within a European Economic Area where the continentals will surrender their 'red line' insistence on the free movement of peoples. It is sad that any newspaper would pay him for such tosh.

Politicians do almost nothing to deny to their fellow citizens the right to despise them.