Former PM's return to politics noticed across Channel
Satirical weekly questions motives as UK's europhobes denounce appointment
ONE aspect of living outside the UK and keeping a fraction of one eye as well as fraction of an ear on primarily UK-focused news outlets is noticing just how unaware they are of how the country is perceived beyond its borders.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) may now have been assigned the remit of international development but senior officials are unlikely to have abandoned the practice of requiring regular reports from UK ambassadors, consuls and emissaries of information and intelligence from their postings but also reflections on how local politicians, business leaders and ‘ordinary people’ perceive the UK. The officials should then summarise those reports for the politicians, the ministers and secretary of state who are publicly accountable for the government department, its remit, policies and activities.
The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union has meant that while principal news outlets from many parts of the world maintain bureaux or correspondents in London, the amount of material they produce that is published for their home country audiences and readerships has diminished greatly since 2020. Without the geographic proximity, membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), historic and cultural links, nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the United Nations’ Security Council, some of those bureaux may well have closed, their occupants brought home or deployed elsewhere.
Occasionally however, something does catch editors’ attention, other than the Royal Family.
This week, the unexpected return of former prime minister David Cameron to government, ironically for them, as secretary of state at the aforementioned Foreign and Commonwealth Office did just that.
Cartoon figure
The appointment was also quickly noticed by cartoonist Kiro – and France’s weekly satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné (the chained duck).
Published less than 24 hours after the former premier’s return to frontline politics, despite through an appointment to the unelected House of Lords as a life peer, Kiro had (Lord) Cameron saying: ‘I want to negotiate our return to the EU’.
While UK-based news outlets – and the pro-Brexit right and far right wings of the country’s Conservative Party were quick, and loud, to denounce any attempts to bring the country once again closer to Europe, the Canard cartoon’s appearance and what it says is significant, especially as so much can be read into it.
Would Cameron really try to undo the ‘will of the people’, even though the 2016 Withdrawal Referendum should have been only ‘advisory’? (Some still uphold that it was illegal, although this has never been tested in the courts.) Does it signify a hope – in Paris if nowhere else in Europe – that the UK could either apply to be re-admitted? If that is the case, which of the 27 EU nations and governments would agree? And on what terms?
Dire prospects
Continued – and continuing – europhobic in-fighting in Westminster has damaged and diminished what standing the UK did have on the mainland. That influential newspaper proprietors and editors have fuelled this for so long and now appear to be ignoring it are unlikely to ease the increasingly dire political and economic prospects now facing the UK.
That the Canard has, in a very small way, that the UK – and a political figure of the 21st century (whose legacy is, like a certain yeast-based spread, either loved or loathed) probably does provide a little reassurance for those residents who notice it that neither has been totally forgotten … quite yet.
Cameron’s pre-Brexit international experience may have still some currency, but would the europhobe right allow renewed proximity to the EU, despite the huge transport and environmental benefits of doing more business with your nearest neighbour and a time of ferocious financial difficulties?
Might Lord Cameron’s heart have grown fonder during his absence from both politics and the EU? Only time – and perhaps other Canard cartoonists – will tell.