Send in the clowns..
It is not really news that President Macron calls Boris Johnson a clown and a knucklehead. I am surprised he is so polite and certainly many other leaders must have their own names for the UK’s PM, not many dripping with respect and admiration, I suspect.
More newsworthy is the accusation that in private the UK’s PM tells the French President that he really loves France and the French but he has to attack them in public because that is what his supporters expect.
The problem with riding the populist tiger is that you can’t get off, or it will eat you. Hence, attacks on the French, asylum seekers, Human Rights, the right to protest, the power of the courts and ,of course, the liberal, metropolitan elite who are stopping the government doing the patriotic thing.
In truth, promising people what they want when you know it is wrong, illegal, dangerous, racist and impossible to deliver, means you have to find someone to blame for your own failures. Not once but every time, for ever.
Of course, anyone who is not a clown or a knucklehead would have known this in advance and not got on the tiger in the first place.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.