At the risk of boring those who have already read Charles Bremner’s blog, it is worth saying something about the extraordinary coverage Tony Blair has had in the French press over the past 24 hours. Charles wrote his blog on the morning Blair stood down, commentating on how much had been said in the written press and morning radio, but in fact it went on all day. All day the main radio station, France Inter, spoke of little else to the point where it became almost embarrassing: “2,000 years of history”, a radio programme, was dedicated to Blair’s ten years in power, the evening phone in was given over to his reign, the evening news was full of little else. It came close to overkill, cerainly for my French wife.

Even more surprising, almost all the comments were favourable. In case you think this might be just politeness or nostalgia, compare the way the French press handled Blair’s exit with their treatment of Chirac’s departure only a few weeks before. Few commentators then could think of any memorable achievement, apart from keeping France out of the Iraq débacle, another point of comparison with Blair, since although that same event is the one most criticised on Blair’s record, on balance it was given far less weight than his many successes.

The praise was also surprising because 18 months ago, when, in the FT, Ségolène Royal showed a mild and perfectly reasonable appreciation of some of Blair’s achievements, she was howled down not only by her comrades but by the press too. At that time Blair’s London was compared to Dickens’ – with a shameful, growing and unbridgeable gap between the rich and the poor.

Yesterday too, it was Blair’s poor record on poverty that attracted a lot of attention. Poverty is an emotive word which usually conjures up out-dated images bearing little relation to today’s poor. Poverty used to be associated with the elderly who had not enough to live on, the long-term unemployed and people not having enough to eat. Those images are no longer accurate: the poor today are often in work, but cannot earn enough to keep pace with spiralling costs; often they are single, working mothers; often they have enough to eat but eat badly, creating health problems for themselves and their children. Unfortunately these truer images of poverty are becoming more and more common in France. Nevertheless the number of people in Britain earning less than 60% of the national average wage is higher (22%) than in France (12%), where INSEE still puts the poverty threshold lower, at 50% of the median income. I do not know whether the French figures take into account their unemployed (still high) and particularly their RMIstes – those on Revenu minimum d’insertion, that is having either no income or an income insufficient to cover their living expenses. The growing number of RMIstes in France is now over 1.2 million.

Another related criticism thrown at Blair yesterday was the “enormous gap” between the ultra-rich and the poor in Britain. However, according to Eurostat, the gap between the 10% of the population who earn the most and the 10% who earn the least is actually greater in France (a ratio of 3.4) than in the UK (3.2). Which surprised me too.

One aspect of Tony Blair which commentators obviously felt obliged to mention was his religion. For the French this is something which is hard to handle. It simply is not done to talk about a French politician’s religious belief, indeed apart from attending funerals of other politicians or actors, it is hard to find any photographs of them in church or discussion of what they believe in. So Blair’s openess about his faith intrigues them. Sarkozy too, in the closing stages of the campaign, spoke very openly about how Christianity has supported him.

But why this quite sudden praise for Blair? Perhaps it is a sign that France really is ready for the reforms he carried out in Britain, that two months of hyper-activity from Sarkozy at least make you feel more positive, after all those years of almost total stagnation under Chirac and before him Mitterrand. Certainly the simple but staggering contrast between Sarkozy working so energetically on their behalf while the French left tears its own heart out, with Ségolène Royal collapsed in a heap, can only justify the belief that they made the right choice. As Blairism leaves the stage in Britain, so it takes centre stage in France.

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