Prime Minister David Cameron received a gentle ribbing from the British press on Saturday after a cordial summit at which he backed his “friend” French President Nicolas Sarkozy to be re-elected.
“David and Nicolas — the best of amis,” said The Independent, carrying, like many others, a montage of photographs of the grinning pair. There was “so much shaking and slapping that if Mr Sarkozy and Mr Cameron had got any closer, their wives could have taken offence”, The Times’ Adam Sage observed.
The summit, where the two leaders unveiled a nuclear power deal and took a strong position on the Syrian violence, was a far cry from recent encounters at European summits in Brussels, where they clashed bitterly. “What a difference two months makes,” said The Times, while the Daily Mail described the meeting as “a kiss-and-make-up summit”. “Le Snub forgiven and forgotten as Cameron cosies up to Sarko,” said the tabloid. But the paper warned that Cameron was taking a gamble by backing Sarkozy ten weeks before France’s presidential elections. “Sarkozy is trailing his Socialist rival Francois Hollande by a wide margin in the polls,” the Mail said.
“It means the PM’s vocal backing could be risky — alienating the likely winner.” The Times agreed that Cameron’s “fulsome tribute” to Sarkozy, which included congratulating the Frenchman on his leadership during the Libyan conflict, was “surprisingly forthright”. “The Prime Minister seems to have decided that their relationship is worth prolonging,” wrote Sage. “Or perhaps he thinks the alternative — Francois Hollande, the Socialist candidate — would be worse.” Cameron is understood not to be planning to meet Hollande before the election, the paper said.
