EU crisis: The Frogs do love us – they're just hopping mad with Germany
“This is quite unacceptable,” the Liberal Democrat leader is supposed to have fumed at the French government.
I don’t know if the French have been chastened by this rebuke, but I think we should urge Nick to relax. Look at the polls. Anyone would think that Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron began that summit with a secret meeting, at which they agreed to help boost the other’s domestic ratings. “I’ll bash you if you’ll bash me,” they said. “Our voters will love it!” And hey presto. The Prime Minister takes a principled opposition to plans for a Fiscal Union (FU), and shoots ahead of poor old Ed Miliband in the polls.
Sarkozy bolsters his own election hopes as he launches an ever-popular tirade against les rosbifs and their appalling belief in free markets. It’s win-win. That is the point about the pantomime xenophobia between the French and the British: it is essentially innocent — or more innocent than almost any other form of xenophobia; because in our hearts, au fond, neither side really believes it. We have to admit there are times when we enjoy a good old orgy of gratuitous Frog-bashing. There are times when we are all prepared to read how our continental cousins are a bunch of garlic-breathing Strauss-Kahns with a deeply suspect interest in structuralism and gloomy films. In this stereotypical world, their women fail to shave their armpits, they have a weird obsession with suppositories and a fanatical lust to eat our children’s ponies.
Dermatologists have long known about the benefits of a pre and post 
