It would last, I said, about as long as it took Sarkozy to find an issue where defending French interests seemed the only option open to him. And blow everyone else.
My proposition was not an anti-Sarkozy one, more a dig at the kind of people who believe the French must be made to adopt not just Anglo-Saxon ways, but pre-Blair Thatcherite Anglo-Saxon ways, whether they like it or not.
And the French being French, there is not a snowball's hope in hell of it going to script.
If you doubt my word, reflect on comments made today by Sarko in defending - you guessed - his country's farmers. This is the group those English rightwingers most love to mock, lambast and lecture.
I once wrote a straightforward piece allowing a French farmer to argue why he wasn't, after all, such a mollycoddled, unfairly subsidised fat cat only for a colleague to congratulate me, ironically, on being the first reporter to get a pro-French farmer article published in an English national.
This is what Sarko had to say when addressing - you bet - an audience of farmers and warning that France would veto negotiations at the World Trade Organisation if French farming interests were threatened.
"In negotiations at the WTO, if there are efforts to be made, then let everyone make them. Right now, I do do not see what efforts the United States are prepared to make. If that is not understood at the WTO negotiating table, France will use its veto. I am totally determined to defend agriculture as an element of our country's strategic economic power."
Honeymoon over already? Watch for reaction from the usual suspects.
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