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To say the French are furious about being elbowed out of a lucrative contract to supply submarines to Australia is the understatement of the year.
They are incandescent.
Foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said yesterday that he felt he had been 'stabbed in the back' by Washington and London over the 'unacceptable' deal that means the loss of the £48billion order to build 12 diesel-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.
We can only imagine how president Emmanuel Macron – who sees himself as a cross between Napoleon and Jupiter, the supreme Roman god – must be feeling.
After all, it was only in June that Macron hosted Australian prime minister Scott Morrison at the Elysee Palace.
But now Macron finds his country not only billions of pounds short – but also locked out of a key initiative by Western powers to build a bulwark against China.
To say the French are furious about being elbowed out of a lucrative contract to supply submarines to Australia is the understatement of the year. They are incandescent. Above: French president Emmanuel Macron
It is a deeply humiliating development for the leader of the EU's only nuclear state which has one of the biggest military-industrial complexes in the world.
You Britons would not be human, of course, if you didn't feel some smidgeon of schadenfreude at president Macron's predicament.
His loathing of Brexit – he once described the UK's
