24 The Sunday Times April 10, 2022COMMENT
E
mmanuel Macron was technically
an outsider when he won
France’s presidential election in- Then, he knocked on doors
and went on a “great march” to
ask people what they wanted
from their government. He beat
Marine Le Pen, heiress to
France’s right-wing political tradition, by
a convincing margin of 32 percentage
points in the second round run-off.
This time he has stayed out of the race
until late, hoping to stand above the fray
with his statesmanship on Ukraine. That
has been a mistake. Le Pen, made to look
more moderate by her right-wing rival
Éric Zemmour’s inflammatory rhetoric
on immigration, has struck a chord with
working-class voters during a cost-of-
living crisis that plays to Macron’s weak-
nesses. The former Rothschild banker
and the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen are
expected to go head to head after 12
candidates are whittled down to two in
today’s first-round vote. A few weeks ago
the polls gave Macron a lead of about
18 points in the run-off. Le Pen has since
narrowed the gap to about three points.
Last-minute scares over the National
Front, now the National Rally, are a fea-
ture of French politics. Jean-Marie Le Pen
surged to face the centre-right candidate
Jacques Chirac in the second round in
2002, and Marine Le Pen was Macron’s
closest opponent in 2017. In the past
voters whose favourites are knocked out
in the first round have rallied to the con-
ventional candidate in the run-off. But
pollsters report that some supporters of
the left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the
centre-right Valérie Pécresse would swing
behind Le Pen this time.
Le Pen has tried to detoxify the
National Rally brand, dropping support
for “Frexit” and vowing to keep the euro
rather than try to bring back the franc — a
key issue for older voters worried about
their pensions. In most other respects,
though, her policies represent old nation-
alist thinking. She wants to go against EU
rules and give French citizens precedence
over immigrants, even those legally in
France, in housing, jobs and welfare.
Most worrying are Le Pen’s admiration
for President Putin and her desire to pull
France away from the western order. Two
months ago her campaign printed more
than 1.2 million leaflets, most now
destroyed, featuring a photograph of her
shaking hands with the Russian dictator in - Le Pen has spoken sympathetically
about his motivation for invading Ukraine
and warned that “economically, we
would die” when asked whether France
should ban Russian oil and gas imports.
She has previously said she wants to take
France out of Nato, a position since sof-
tened. But even if she kept the country in
the alliance, her antipathy towards Amer-
ica and the EU would fracture the unity of
the coalition that has formed since Rus-
sian atrocities began on February 24.
Admiration for Putin is not unique to
Le Pen. Zemmour has been effusive, and
Macron has had at least 17 calls and one
meeting with the despot since mid-
December, sometimes leading to the
impression that Putin is toying with him.
The occupant of the Élysée Palace himself
said in 2019 that Nato was suffering from
“brain death”. Macron’s vanity may have
lured him towards the idea that he could
play peacemaker in the Kremlin. France’s
military support for Ukraine may have
been tepid but its presence in the alliance
against Putin is essential.
There is plenty to dislike about
Macron, 44, who can look and sound to
the British like an arrogant popinjay,
particularly when it comes to Brexit. The
gilet jaune protests of 2018 and 2019 over
green policies and an increase in petrol
and diesel duty exposed him as out of
touch, even if he has halved primary
school class sizes in poor areas and intro-
duced free school breakfasts. But his man-
agerial centrism has improved France’s
labour market and resulted in a steadier
economy that is more appealing to inves-
tors. Among the 12 candidates today he is
the only grown-up.
Hungary’s election of Viktor Orban for
a fourth time — albeit in an election tilted
heavily in his favour — was a timely warn-
ing that populism is alive and well in the
EU. Orban brushed away concerns over
his support for Putin by portraying him-
self as the guarantor of Hungary’s peace
and security. There can be no compla-
cency about French voters’ ability to see
through Le Pen’s fudging of the same
issue. Recently Macron warned that her
victory was a possibility: “The extremist
danger today is even greater than it was a
few months ago, a few years ago.”
We must hope that does not happen.
Macron is far from perfect, but his loss
would be a nightmare for Europe. We
wish him — and his party, La République
en Marche — bonne chance.
Rich people should be no more or less wel-
come in politics than poor people. If their
wealth has been accrued through talent
rather than luck, it should in fact be seen
as a positive.
Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, has
enjoyed a big dose of both, making mil-
lions of pounds in his previous career as a
hedge fund manager and marrying
Akshata Murty, daughter of the Infosys IT
billionaire Narayana Murthy. His fortune
should be no impediment to his role at the
Treasury or elsewhere. But Murty’s deci-
sion to continue in her status as non-
domiciled for tax purposes when her hus-
band entered government, and his pee-
vish response to its revelation last week,
were serious mistakes.
There is a reason divorce courts con-
sider marital wealth to be shared: married
couples often operate as a unit. For onemember of the unit to exercise a tax break
on the questionable basis that her stay in
Britain is temporary while the other raises
taxes and asks Britons to make difficult
sacrifices appears preposterous.
Murty’s original position last week —
that her Indian citizenship and non-dom
status were interrelated — was misleading.
So was Sunak’s attempt to deflect scrutiny
by personalising the issue. Murty’s
announcement on Friday that she would
pay UK taxes on all income, presumably
including Infosys dividends, amounted to
an admission the couple were wrong.
Sunak, 41, is one of the most capable
members of the government and does not
deserve to lose his career over this epi-
sode. Yet it has raised questions over his
judgment. His credentials as a possible
next leader of the Conservative Party have
been damaged.His wealth is irrelevant: Sunak
displayed poor judgment
It was the Romans who brought the
pleasures of a heated pool to these shores.
Now their legacy is in danger. As we report
today, rocketing energy bills and a
chlorine shortage have combined to make
providing a warm, germ-free place for
people to swim a difficult business. Many
pools may go under.
There is an alternative, of course. For
years wild swimmers have been preach-
ing the virtues of diving into freezing
water that is untainted by chemicals. Theysay it is scientifically proven to make us
happier and healthier.
Maybe so. Still, we hope the pools
survive. Civilisation is, on balance, a good
thing, and, whatever the wild bunch
thinks, there is nothing more civilised
than a gentle, temperate length or two in a
fine old pool.
It comes with another important
benefit to wider society too: practitioners
don’t tend to boast about it quite so much
afterwards.The slow crawl of civilisation
ESTABLISHED 1822Macron is not perfect, but
beware the alternative
Dominic Lawson
world-class inferiority complex. Sometimes
they just need to lash out and show why they
are exceptional.”
This is getting to the heart of the matter. The
British and the French also tend to think we are
exceptional. But we have accommodated
ourselves to no longer being an imperial
power. That was made easier by the fact that
our empires were far away, not part of the
same landmass. Russia’s empire was all
around, none of it more significant than
Ukraine. It is not just Putin but the majority of
Russians who refer to Ukraine as “ours”. At the
same time there is a widespread contempt for
Ukrainians as a people, rather in the way that
the English used to regard the Irish — a sort of
inferior version of themselves. The Irish famine
was one consequence. Stalin, whom Putin has
rehabilitated, deliberately inflicted mass
starvation on Ukraine.
But what truly eats at the Russian soul is the
sense that they are seen as the barbarians, and
that those Europeans they have conquered, or
seek to conquer, look down upon them as
such. More than that, there is a pervasive view
that their own suffering is entirely the fault of
“the West” rather than anything they have
done to themselves. This goes back a long way.
I have been rereading Astolphe de Custine’s
Letters from Russia, an account of the French
aristocrat’s visit in 1839. After meeting Tsar
Nicholas I, who tells him that “despotism is
suited to the genius of [our] nation”, de
Custine warns his readers: “We are much
mistaken in our understanding of the part
this state will play in Europe ... she will
propagate tyranny as a pretended palliative to
anarchy.” That is exactly Putin’s line, in the
great Russian tradition.
De Custine was no Russophobe, which made
his observations simultaneously sympathetic
and shattering. None more so than when he
writes: “The Russian empire is the country in
the world where men are most unhappy,
because they suffer simultaneously from the
disadvantages of barbarism and from those of
civilisation... They are most unhappy and
most endearing.”
So here is more bad news. If Russia
experiences a form of defeat in this imperial
adventure (as it almost invariably has in the
wars it started), the dominant internal reaction
will be not repentance but redoubled self-pity
— and blame of “the West” for starting it.
They will definitely not thank Boris Johnson
for telling them they’re better than that.
[email protected]S
peaking partly in Russian, Boris
Johnson last week delivered a video
message, recorded in Downing Street,
to the Russian people. It included
images of the invader’s barbaric
handiwork on the streets of Irpin and
Bucha. Johnson told his intended
audience: “Your president stands
accused of committing war crimes. But I
cannot believe he is acting in your name. Your
president knows that if you could see what was
happening, you would not support his war.”
In general, the prime minister’s handling
of the crisis has been prescient and sure-
footed. But my first reaction was that this
broadcast was a futile stunt that would fail to
persuade a single Russian who had been
supporting the “special military operation” to
change his or her mind.
This was only confirmed when I spoke to a
friend with many years’ experience of dealing
with Russia in business and personally. When I
sent him a link to the video, he responded: “Of
the tiny percentage of the population who will
see it, a large majority will find it highly
offensive, and all the rest irksome. They will
see it as proof that the British are anti-Russian
and always out to do them down.”
I should add that my friend is something of
an old Cold Warrior and far from naive about
Russia. There has been no greater illustration
of such naivety than the widely held opinion
that if only the Russian people were told “the
truth” about what is happening in Ukraine,
President Putin would be on the way out, to be
succeeded by a western-leaning figure — for
example, the person often described
(incorrectly) on the BBC as “the leader of
Russia’s opposition”, Alexei Navalny.
He is a man of astonishing courage, as well as
a campaigner of rare talent and ingenuity. He is
also the subject of a film coming out in the UK
this month, which gives a full account of these
attributes. But it doesn’t note Navalny’s earlier
support for Russia’s invasion of Georgia and his
description of the targets of that operation as
“rodents”. Although he is asked, to his
discomfort, about his (much earlier)
attendance of nationalistic rallies, in which
racist slogans were the dominant discourse.
To be clear, Navalny’s criticism of the
invasion of Ukraine, somehow transmitted
even while he is incarcerated, is as powerful as
anyone’s. But, as Anatol Lieven, the author of a
book on Ukraine and Russia, observed three
weeks before that invasion: “Western
commentators seem to be implicitly assumingthat should Navalny win power (which he
almost certainly will not) Russia’s foreign
policy would change radically in a pro-western
direction. This is nonsense. Navalny’s
supporters are backing him out of (entirely
justified) fury at Russian state corruption ...
not to change foreign policy. Every
independent opinion poll has suggested that
Putin’s foreign and security policies have
enjoyed overwhelming public support; and
above all there is very little in Navalny’s own
record to suggest that he would change them.”
Domestic support for Putin has only grown
in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine — despite
the increasing awareness of the loss of Russian
soldiers’ lives. It is true that the polls by
independent British agencies in Russia that
demonstrate this “rally round the flag” effect
also reflect the power of Putin’s grip on the
domestic media. But when the London School
of Economics used sophisticated polling
methods last week to obtain the views of
Russians who were younger, more urban and
better educated — and so probably more liberal
— than the population average, its researchers
reported that the outcome was “extremely
concerning”. They concluded: “Even among
this group of people — and despite the fact that
the brutality of the war is becoming more
evident by the day — the Russian leadership
ostensibly can count on the genuine support of
a substantial part of the population.”
The equally unwelcome truth is that the
economic sanctions applied to Russia, while
doubtless the cause of so many thousands of
citizens leaving the country while they can,
have also added to resentment of the West
within its borders. There was a telling
encounter last week in the Business section
of this paper with an American banker
packing up his bags to leave Moscow. Even
his highly educated Russian friends and
colleagues had become “jingoistic and
antagonistic”. He observed: “Russians have aI
really hate “wine o’clock” — the time of
day when certain middle-class mothers of
young children pour themselves giant
drinks. The children are finally out of the
way, and the white wine is calling. It’s time
to drink alone again for a couple of hours,
with maybe a corner of the internet for
company. Woohoo!
Wine o’clock is now such an accepted part of
parenting that it has spawned its own
merchandise, like a Build-a-Bear teddy of a
female bear with long ears wearing a top that
says, “It’s wine o’clock somewhere” and
holding a glass and a bottle of red, or a
toddler’s T-shirt that says, “I’m the reason
mummy drinks”, which is microscopically
amusing and gigantically sad.
You could kit yourself, your family and your
entire house out in this stuff. Supermarket
aisles are awash in special mummy wine, often
pink, with pretty labels and elegant fonts that
suggest lifestyle accessory rather than
accessory to liver disease. If a TV show needs a
visual that immediately conveys “mother of
young children”, it’s usually a woman leaning
against a kitchen counter, gulping down a glass
of wine and exhaling gratefully as it hits. This is
rarely presented as a despairing or concerning
act, or even as at all weird. Wine o’clock
pioneers are now the parents of Gen Z
teenagers, who as well as being
unprecedentedly anxious and fragile are
unprecedentedly alcohol-averse.
I find wine o’clock so awful partly because it
encourages the idea that having children is a
nightmare to zone out from at the earliest
opportunity, and partly because of what is
essentially the normalising of excessive,
women-only alcohol consumption, presented
as something jolly and uplifting.
You can’t celebrate the children’s bedtime
with weed or pills — well, I suppose you can,
but you probably wouldn’t put your infant in a
T-shirt that says, “I’m the reason mummy loves
skunk”, and expect people to smile at you
benignly in the supermarket. Substitute wine,though, and there’s no problem. The idea of
respectable, responsible middle-class mothers
as functioning alcoholics is now so well rooted
that nobody bats an eyelid, just as nobody
batted an eyelid at spaced-out, tranquillised
1960s housewives.
Why do we accept wine o’clock so
unquestioningly, instead of wondering what
has happened to make so many mothers want
to numb themselves with drink so regularly?
A former psychotherapist, Veronica Valli,
who now works as a sobriety coach, says in a
new book that it’s partly because society thinks
there are only two sorts of drinker: easily
identifiable chronic alcoholics, who are
staggering around broken-veined and smelling
of wee, and everybody else, who can take it or
leave it. “In reality,” Valli says, “many people
drink to excess who don’t fit the definition of
an alcoholic.”
But it could also be because the very nature
of parenting has changed to what strikes
women of my generation as a quasi-demented
extent. What used to be something to muddle
through as best one could is now seen as a full-
time, always-on project, no matter how young
or old the child. When my children were little,
we did things that pleased me as well as things
that pleased them — we’d go to a shop I liked or
an exhibition I wanted to see, or meet a friend
in a café. I took them into my adult world as
often as I took myself into their child world. If
there were complaints (there weren’t, thoughmy recall may be rose-tinted), well, that was
too bad.
Parenting today seems infinitely harder
work, not least because of the really odd sense
that parents need to ingratiate themselves with
their children, as if the children were going to
rate every day out of 100 and be very cross if
the score was too low. It’s weird, and it has
nothing to do with what parenting is about.
Also, constantly trying to ingratiate yourself
with someone breeds resentment and entails
such endless sacrifices that obviously by the
end of the day the poor parent in charge — still
usually the mother — is begging for mercy. No
wonder she practically sobs with joy as she
uncorks that bottle.
“This new ‘Mommy needs wine’ culture
strikes me as a barely concealed primal
scream,” Valli writes. “Women lack the
support, childcare and community that are
necessary to raise a child.” She is right: wine
o’clock, presented as a laugh, is self-medication
on a massive scale. There’s parenting itself —
everyone is a helicopter parent nowadays, and
it really doesn’t seem to be making anyone at
all happy — and then there is what the act of
becoming a parent does to a woman’s sense of
self. What is she now, exactly? A mother, yes,
but what about all the other parts of her? What
is she supposed to do with those? What does
she do for fun? The answer is obvious and easy:
she has a drink, of course, in her reassuringly
wholesome kitchen (no alkies here!), and in
doing so she reconnects with her free spirit,
her lightness, all the things she liked best about
herself. Where is the harm? Everyone she
knows is doing it too, and God knows she needs
that drink.
It is true: she does. Her life is exhausting and
hardly ever her own any more. But that is not
always the fault of the children. It is, rather, the
fault of ridiculously unrealistic and massively
stressful expectations about how parenting
looks. If she eased up on those, she might not
need wine o’clock after all.
@IndiaKnightIndia Knight
Mummy’s evening drink has been normalised, but it’s damaging for everyone
We have to call time
on wine o’clock
PM’s lecture to Putin’s public will only harden anti-western sentiment
Not all alcoholics are
broken-veined and
smelling of weeDomestic support for
Putin has only grown
since the invasionRussians won’t change
their minds on Ukraine