Can Britain and France put their differences behind them?

Six monthseu ago, during her campaign to lead the Tory party, Liz Truss claimed not to know whether Emmanuel Macron was a “friend or foe”. Her successor as prime minister, Rishi Sunak, . On March 10th he will lead an eager pack of ministers up the steps into the Elysée Palace in Paris for a summit with the French president and government. With a freshly negotiated deal on Northern Ireland in his pocket, Mr Sunak will be hoping that this unlocks more from the French. That may be harder than he thinks.The first Franco-British summit was held in 1976 in Rambouillet under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and James Callaghan. Since then, these confabs have become almost yearly events. In the 1980s and 1990s François Mitterrand held 12; Jacques Chirac, his successor as president, 11. But Brexit, and its damaging fall-out, has meant that not a single bilateral summit between the two countries has taken place since 2018, when Mr Macron’s government sat down with Theresa May’s at Sandhurst.