Schedule clashes are inevitable during the festive season, and on the evening of Dec. 19, the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and Britain’s Foreign Secretary, William Hague, held Christmas drinks at opposite poles of the city center. Diplomats clustering at Hague’s bash, in the gilded pomp of Lancaster House, conferred. Might it be possible to dash from one event to the other? Georg Boomgaarden, Germany’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, demurred. The mayor had just authored an offensive article about Germany, Boomgaarden grumbled; he had no intention of gracing Johnson’s party. London’s mayor is an ebullient blond with a history of dropping diplomatic bombshells. Papua New Guinea’s emissary to the U.K. demanded an apology after Johnson linked the country to “cannibalism and chief killing” in his weekly column for the Daily Telegraph. Johnson’s journalism also got him in trouble at the height of the 2009 credit crunch, when he dismissed his £250,000 annual fee for the columns — about $390,725 — as “chicken feed.” But what irritated Boomgaarden in Johnson’s latest dispatch wasn’t a throwaway remark or ill-considered view. The piece — “E.U. Crisis: The Frogs Do Love Us — They’re Just Hopping Mad with Germany” — was a classic exercise in Continental baiting, a tradition as central to the British cultural mainstream as vinegar on chips, sticky-floored pubs and that little clicking noise Brits make if you elbow ahead of them in a queue. Johnson’s article achieved a crowd-pleasing twofer, tweaking German and French noses by pointing out that a recent exchange of hostilities between the French and British over efforts to stabilize the euro masked deeper tensions between France and Germany. That’s true enough. But Johnson, like John Cleese’s hapless hotelier Basil Fawlty when confronted with German guests, couldn’t resist mentioning the war — or a clutch of wars and battlefields: Waterloo, Verdun, Mers-el-Kébir and Suez. Despite these “misunderstandings,” France and Britain remain “indispensable allies”; France, however, “is facing up to the reality that the European experiment has failed to contain German economic might, and that
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