Macron and Johnson’s preening rivalry keeps lobster pot boiling

While the French and British leaders make political capital out of fishers, the row threatens to spill into crucial Cop26

To publicly accuse a long-time friend and ally of lacking credibility and breaking his word whenever its suits him is disobliging at the best of times. To do so on the eve of a watershed global summit, Cop26, which your friend" is hosting and where trust is vital, looks like a verbal act of war.

Whether the accuser, Emmanuel Macron, France's centrist president, deliberately sought to escalate his confrontation with Boris Johnson over fishing licences is unclear. He probably did. He knows his words are potentially deeply damaging as Britain struggles to achieve a breakthrough in Glasgow. But Johnson has become his bete noire.

For him, Johnson is an opportunist, a rightwing nationalist-populist, an anti-European - in short, an unscrupulous, unprincipled bounder. The problem with this latest iteration of perfidious Albion, an abiding theme in French politics, is that, in significant ways, Macron himself is not so very different.