6 2GN The Sunday Times April 10, 2022NEWS
her bullhorn voice. Her emphasis is on
boosting pouvoir d’achat — spending
power — which has emerged as the main
issue in this election. She has promised
giveaways including exemption from
income tax for the under-30s. Long
dogged by questions of competence, she
claims her programme has been costed
by experts, though critics warn it will
send government debt, already nearing
115 per cent of GDP — compared with the
UK’s 95 per cent — soaring further. Her
hostility to immigration is still there, but
couched in more positive terms — what
Le Pen, 53, calls putting France and the
French first on everything from the
supremacy of its culture to housing.
These days she also embraces a some-
what alternative lifestyle: after two mar-
riages and her relationship with Aliot, the
mother of three now lives with a child-
hood friend named only as Ingrid,
although she insists they are not a couple.
After a dramatic surge in support over
the past fortnight, Le Pen looks set to win
about 23 per cent of the vote today, the
latest polls suggest, setting her up for a
run-off for the presidency in two weeks
with Macron, who leads on 26 per cent.
Barring a last-minute upset, Jean-Luc
Mélenchon — the French Jeremy Corbyn
— who trails on 16 per cent, looks an
unlikely threat, while Éric Zemmour, 63,
who has sought to outflank her on the
right, may not reach double figures.
The National Rally leader’s support is
strongest in small-town and rural France
but spans all age groups, including the
young. “She really knows how to appeal
to all the people, to every group, she
doesn’t forget anyone,” said Angélique,
25, sporting a “Jeunes with Marine”
(young people with Marine) T-shirt. She
had arrived with a busload of supporters
from Lourdes, 230 miles to the west.
Inevitably, the campaign has been
impacted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,
although perhaps not as expected:
Macron’s ratings initially jumped to more
than 30 per cent thanks to a “rally round
the flag” effect but have fallen back as
voters focus instead on energy prices.
This has played to his rival’s message.
Curiously, Le Pen does not appear to
have been much damaged by her links
with Russia. In 2014 her party took out a
€9.4 million loan from a Russian bank,
and before the invasion her campaign
printed 1.2 million leaflets with a photo-
graph of her meeting Putin in 2017 — later
pulped. Yet polls suggest her supporters
hardly mind, especially since she has
made a point of welcoming refugees from
Ukraine — overwhelmingly white, Chris-
tian and largely female. Her party’s atti-
tude to Muslim immigration is less warm.
Macron embodies the status quo,
dominating the centre ground with his
mantra of being “neither left nor right”.
Zemmour’s campaign harks back to “les
trente glorieuses”, a supposedly golden
period from the end of the Second World
War to the mid-1970s, when the French
economy was growing fast and society
still predominantly mono-ethnic. Mélen-
chon opposes free-market economics
and wants to pull France out of Nato.
There is a gulf between Paris and the
other main cities, predominantly liberal
and thriving, and small towns and the
countryside, where many feel leftbehind. This was highlighted by the gilets
jaunes (yellow vest) protests of late 2018
that began in response to a proposed
diesel tax rise and turned into a much
broader provincial revolt. It is these vot-
ers that appear most drawn to Le Pen,
who is expected to do poorly in the cities.
For Christophe Guilluy, an author who
has studied la France périphérique
(peripheral France), Macron, 44, may
pay the price for decades of failure by suc-
cessive governments to tackle the under-
lying causes of discontent, especially
among the 70 per cent of workers who
take home less than €2,000 a month.
Although the French leader effectively
paid off the gilets jaunes and spent freely
during the pandemic, his efforts to revive
France’s manufacturing industry could
take years to make headway. “The main
problems are the concentration of
employment in the big cities, deindustri-
alisation and globalisation,” Guilluy said.
“There is no magical solution, obviously
... but Macron could have done more.”
The winner of the run-off vote will
depend on who wins the support of those
who voted for the defeated candidates
first time around. Despite Zemmour and
Le Pen’s mutual distaste, 76 per cent of
his voters are likely to back her in a run-
off, against 13 per cent who will turn to
Macron, according to a poll by Ifop. The
real focus, however, is on the 30 per cent
expected to back Mélenchon, 70, and
other left and green candidates, who in
2017 joined a “Republican Front” to keep
out Le Pen. Then, she was trounced by
Macron 66 per cent to 34 per cent. Will
they back the president or stay home?
Mathieu Gallard, Ifop’s research
director, believes that Macron will win
again, though it will be close, with some
polls showing the president ahead by as
little as 51-49 per cent. “Despite every-
thing, I think there is nevertheless a
majority of French people who are afraid
of the National Rally and above all who
don’t consider Marine Le Pen credible
enough to run the country,” Gallard said.
@Peter_Conradi
Editorial, page 245842
43
4445 46 46 46 46 4647 47 47%57
56
555454 54 54 54(^5353) 53%
Macron
Le Pen
Mar
26
Mar
28
Mar
30
Apr
2
Apr
4
Apr
6
Apr
8
Source: Ipsos
How Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen
would fare in a second-round run-off
The first to conquer Everest:
Tensing and... Bourdillon?
ANTOINE GYORI /CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES; DANIEL COLE/AP
Since the news of the
conquest of Everest was
announced on the morning of
the Queen’s coronation, the
names of Edmund Hillary and
Tensing Norgay have been
yoked together in a haze of
heroic endeavour.
But a slip of the pen by the
British ambassador in Nepal,
responsible for relaying the
news back to Britain, meant
Hillary was nearly written out
of the first draft of history.
The original confidential
telegram dispatched on
June 1, 1953 by Christopher
Summerhayes, Britain’s
ambassador to Nepal, shows
that he initially wrote: “Mt
Everest climbed 29 May by
Bourdillon & Tensing. All
well. Tell Everest Committee
and Times.”
Tom Bourdillon was on the
trip — but had not made the
summit. He had made the
first attempt three days
before the successful ascent,
but was forced to turn back
327ft from the top.
Summerhayes then
crossed out Bourdillon’s
name and wrote Hillary’s
name above it in capital
letters before sending it to the
Foreign Office. The Queen-to-
be was informed on the eve of
her coronation and the news
Nicholas Hellen was published in The Times on June 2 as a “tribute of
glory” with the headline:
“Everest conquered. Hillary
and Tensing reach the
summit.”
Mick Conefrey, a
mountaineering historian
who uncovered the slip-up,
also found an unpublished
account written by
Summerhayes’s son, David,
in which he admitted the
error and said: “His
manuscript copy of the
telegram shows that he had
originally written, perhaps in
the excitement of the
moment, ‘Bourdillon’ instead
of ‘Hillary’ before correcting
the draft.”
But this glosses over the
steps taken by James Morris,
the Times journalist, to
protect his scoop.
As a sponsor of the
expedition, The Times had
secured exclusive reporting
rights, and Morris had to
contend with rivals from the
Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph
and Reuters, one of whom
walked as far as base camp at
an altitude of 17,598ft.
Morris, who later became
the travel writer Jan Morris,
realised that if he sent a
message which looked like a
code, his rivals, waiting at the
nearest radio station in the
village of Namche Bazaar, 30
miles down the mountain,
might deduce the news.
He created a cipher in
which each climber with a
chance of being selected for a
summit attempt was given a
phrase that could plausibly
be part of a routine update.
He asked a Times colleague to
pass a copy of the cipher to
Summerhayes.
A journalist did intercept
the message but failed to
work it out, said Conefrey,
whose book Everest, 1922,
recounting the story of the
first attempt on the peak, was
published last week.
@NicholasHellen
Edmund Hillary with Alfred
Gregory and Tom
Bourdillon at Everest base
camp after the successful
ascent in 1953
GEORGE BAND/ROYAL GEOGRAPHICALSOCIETY/GETTY IMAGES
Le Pen
aims to
prove mightier
than Macron’s
status quo
Those queueing in the sun in Perpignan
for Marine Le Pen’s last rally before
today’s presidential election agreed on
one thing: France has lost its way. They
just could not decide when this began —
was it during the past five years under
Emmanuel Macron or is the malaise far
more deeply rooted?
For Thierry Vidal, 54, who works for
the council and takes home €1,
(£1,086) a month, day-to-day reality
makes him angry. “Filling up my trolley at
the supermarket costs me €200. Not long
ago, it used to be half that,” he com-
plained. “But my wages don’t go up. Is
that normal?”
Inside the Palais des Expositions,
unhappiness turned to flag-waving
euphoria as their heroine took to the
stage, introduced by the mayor, Louis
Aliot, who in 2020 won the southern
town of 120,000 people for Le Pen’s
National Rally party (and for a decade
was her partner). They sang the Marseil-
laise with gusto; any mention of Macron
was greeted with pantomime boos.
Le Pen smiles a lot and has softened
Promising no income tax for the under-30s,
the populist appeals to a new generation
as well as discontented rural France
Peter Conradi Perpignan
French voters have defaced
campaign posters to show
their displeasure with, from
left, above, Macron, Le Pen,
Zemmour and Mélenchon
Our country has
been auctioned off