UK's Theresa May fails to form French connection with Emmanuel Macron

BREXIT was on the menu on Friday night when Theresa May met Emmanuel Macron in France for a five-course working dinner. The visit to the French leader's summer holiday retreat boosted the personal rapport between the two leaders, but predictably did little to break the substantive impasse in the UK's EU exit negotiations.

That Friday's outcome would be inconclusive, despite the fact that Mr Macron is keen to avoid a messy Brexit divorce, was likely given the fact that France has had perhaps the most hardline stance to the UK's exit. And in this context, the French president has long dismissed UK attempts to try to 'divide and rule' the EU-27 by picking off individual states, weakening the hand of the EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier.

Paris has long had a complex, contradictory relationship with London in the context of EU affairs. And the ardently pro-Brussels Mr Macron, who believes Brexit to be an act of political vandalism to the continent, has been accused by UK ministers of holding up progress in negotiations since he was elected. Mr Macron's Brexit positioning, including his robust stance on future UK access to the Single Market, is reinforced by broader French plans to pitch Paris as a competing financial centre to London which began in earnest under the presidency of Francois Hollande. This saw former finance minister Michel Sapin and Mr Hollande's Brexit special envoy Christian Noyer, former Bank of France governor, begin openly promoting Paris with key financial firms after the June 2016 referendum.