PARIS — Both French and British officials yesterday tried to play down the gravity of last week’s row between President Jacques Chirac and the Prime Minister Tony Blair but the once comfortable relationship between the two men has clearly ended.
The French government confirmed yesterday that the Anglo-French summit at Le Touquet in December has been postponed until the New Year. The French Foreign Office spokesman said: "Both sides needed a little more time to prepare this important event". One official described the delay in private as a "cooling-off period" but it is clear that the postponement was intended on Chirac’s side as a snub to Blair. French officials said that it would be "wrong to say that there was no connection" between the re-scheduling of the summit and the angry exchange between the two leaders at the Brussels summit on Friday.
The quarrel seems to have been largely a question of simmering personal resentments over a series of issues, ranging from Iraq to the EU budget, bursting finally out into the open. Officials in Paris, Brussels and London were at a loss to understand yesterday why such a routine European event as a Franco-British row over farm spending should have been the occasion for an unseemly, semi-public spat between two experienced politicians. "There is no particular problem between the British and French governments. We are getting on well over a series of issues. But there does seem to be a problem between our leaders," one official said.
President Chirac is said to have taken exception to Blair lecturing him during the EU summit on the proper meaning of a past agreement on European farm spending. He told Blair later that he had been "very rude" and that "no-one has ever spoken to me like that". In truth, much worse things have been said at EU summits. Chirac once described Margaret Thatcher as a "housewife" and complained — during a plenary session of a summit in Brussels in 1987 — that the then British prime minister wanted his "balls". Some commentators in Paris were inclined to blame Chirac for Friday’s spat. They said that the French president was at his worst during EU negotiations, becoming quickly rattled if he was unable to impose his own way. Chirac angered the Germans at a summit in 1999 and alienated virtually everyone except Blair with his peremptory style when chairing the Nice summit in 2001.
It seems that some bad feeling has also developed between Blair and Chirac over their different approaches to the Iraq crisis. Although, at official level, the two governments have cooperated well in the United Nations, Chirac is said to have been annoyed by Blair’s seeming willingness to echo in public the changing daily line from the Bush administration. The French president was apparently especially irritated last week when Blair said that Britain would be prepared to join the US in military action against Iraq, whether the UN approved or not. Chirac is said to have regarded this as an unhelpful remark at a time when French attempts to push through a UN compromise, acceptable to both the US and more dovish members of the Security Council, appeared to be gaining ground.
Last week’s row caps a long period of disenchantment with Chirac in the Blair camp. When the Socialist Lionel Jospin was the French prime minister, Downing Street tried to cultivate Chirac as a way of irritating Jospin, regarded as too "old Labour".
Blair’s team rapidly reached the conclusion that Chirac was an unreliable friend but personal relations between the president and the British prime minister have been relaxed until now. (The Independent)
30 October 2002