It is not that he is wrong about the Erdogan regime but rather that he acts impetuously and unilaterally, driven by love of global attention. Perhaps he needs it since he suffered a crushing blow in the recent municipal elections, defeated by the ‘green wave’ in half the great cities of France. He may be the defender of the Paris Agreement in the eyes of the world, but the world is easily fooled.
It is this prickly mix of vindictiveness and faux-royalism that makes Mr Macron such a headache in Brexit talks. The word from Brussels is that he wants to toughen the terms, suspecting that Michel Barnier (a closet anglophile) will give away too much to secure a deal.
The supposed bone of contention is state aid, but Mr Macron knows that the UK is the least inclined among the big West European states to resort to subsidies. It is really a proxy fight about something else. He aims for British legal subordination, that is to say the evisceration of Brexit itself.
But none of this changes my view that Britain’s quarantine rule is ill-judged. The UK government has swung from paralysed fatalism five months ago to something bordering on zero-risk, when such a policy has already been overtaken by events and by advances in science.
As I wrote earlier this week, the picture today is fundamentally different from the picture in March. The fatality rate of ICU patients in the NHS has halved, thanks to dexamethasone, anticoagulants, earlier use of oxygen, and better clinical know-how.
Recent T cell and modelling studies suggest that large numbers of people may have immunity despite not yielding detectable antibodies, and therefore that society is at less risk. Many of those in face-to-face jobs have already been infected. Mathematically, the exponential transmission rate of March cannot be repeated.