Trump and Macron are the new Bush and Blair – and we all know how that ended

Who knows, perhaps this is the beginning of the most beautiful Franco-American friendship since Rick and Louis ambled down the runway at the end of Casablanca

Finally, as even the most fervent Remainer may agree, Brexit is responsible for something to be cherished.

The “special relationship” is dead (or at the very least, in cryogenic stasis). Good riddance to the era of ritual obedience – and long live what Emmanuel Macron, such a gifted translator, unveiled this week as “le relationship especiale”.

With Britain’s global irrelevance cemented by the semiconscious uncoupling from the EU, it falls to the president of the French Republic to hog the spotlight as the first foreign leader granted a full state visit by Donald Trump.

Spare a pang of pity for Theresa May. While she sits morosely in Downing Street with nothing but the Windrush catastrophe and the customs union conundrum for comfort, Macron swanks around Washington and George Washingon’s Virginia plantation, gushing over the tangerine grifter like some pantomime roué seducing some old broad he knows to be incapable of resisting the most nauseatingly insincere flattery.

Shortly before he left for DC, the sombre French newspaper Liberation quoted presidential sources describing Trump as not only “very intelligent” but also – what else? – “coherent”. Ordinarily, you’d automatically source such sentiments to sledgehammer irony. But identifying humorous intent from citizens of the country that awarded Jerry Lewis the Légion d’honneur is a fool’s game, and we are obliged to take them literally.

That “very intelligent” clangs a piquant bell. Back in the age of Freedom Fries, when that revered US diplomat Homer J Simpson dismissed the French as cheese-eating surrender monkeys, Alastair Campbell briefed hacks that George W Bush was very smart. A new dawn has broken for an old precedent, has it not?

A wunderkind northern European social democrat – a cunning triangulator who won a landslide by splitting the difference between left and right as he promised a new kind of politics – chums up with a borderline imbecilic Republican president.

What could possibly go wrong?

You’d probably have to strap him to a Damascus interrogation chair, and fix electrodes to his genitals. But with a suitably electrifying incentive to tell the truth, Tony Blair could answer that one.

He thought that by transforming himself after a human colonoscopy and hunting down W’s polyps, he would buy enough influence to mitigate the worst of Bush’s instincts. But then Roy of Siegfried and Roy was convinced that Mantecore, his white Siberian tiger, was a docile chum. As indeed it was, until it tore out Roy’s throat.

Now it’s Macron’s turn to test the taming-the-tiger theory, and bonne chance to him with that. A central feature of his sycophancy offensive is the noble ambition to persuade Trump not to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal which has been working so well.

One presumes the result will be a frank form of his earlier efforts to dissuade Trump from pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord – and for the same reason. Whatever Obama did, Trump will undo if he possibly can. For him, no motivation is as strong as pursuing his infantile vendetta.

But whatever the success or otherwise of Macron’s attempt to talk sense to Trump about Iran, and about abandoning his global trade war, you have to admire the audacity.

Whether from raw courage or some kind of Blairesque messiah complex, he is risking his support with a domestic audience that regards Trump much as we do – and Macron has precious little of that left. His efforts to reform French working practices have provoked an avalanche of strikes and civil unrest under which his popularity has collapsed.

The upside to that is that it could provide a bonding conversation piece to smooth over any tiny doctrinal differences over dinner. Macron’s most recent approval rating was 40-57. Trump’s average is virtually identical. Something else they share is a gaping spousal age gap, Trump being a touch more than 23 years older than Melania, and Macron a shade less than 25 younger than Brigitte.

Those statistical links may grease the conversational wheels, while Macron cites their shares maverick-ness as proof they are geopolitical conjoined twins. “We have this very special relationship because the both of us are probably the mavericks of the system,” as he told Fox News.

But judging by his resistance in last year’s battle of the handshakes, Macron isn’t the kind of sissy who would tolerate the humiliation of being casually ignored, let alone being presidentially yo’d, for long. It would take Blair’s limitless capacity for Uriah Heepish ingratiation to do that.

Of course, it’s far too early to dismiss ”le relationship especiale” as a flash in the pan that will eddy down the U-bend of international diplomacy in the time it takes some Fox & Friends bozo-guru to remind Trump of his intent to welch on the Iranian deal.

Who knows, perhaps this is the beginning of the most beautiful Franco-American friendship since Rick and Louis ambled down the runway at the end of Casablanca.

But frankly that’s not our concern. Our business is to gaze from afar at a cocky, grandstanding European leader gently greasing himself into the upper bowel of a sensationally ignorant US President – and thank the Lord that this time, just for once, it isn’t ours.