An editorial in Friday’s Le Figaro (France’s equivalent to the New York Times) is headlined “Mélenchon or the moral suicide of the left.”

The same statement could be applied to Britain’s Green party. Their open pandering to the Muslim vote in Thursday’s Gorton & Denton by-election was arguably a new low in British politics. It wasn’t just Israel and so-called Islamophobes who were targeted (in Urdu) in their campaign leaflets and videos, so was India.

Le Figaro’s scathing critique of the left-wing populist leader Jean-Luc Melenchon was written as a reaction to his visit to Lyon on Thursday evening. A fortnight earlier 23-year-old Quentin Deranque had been kicked to death in Lyon, allegedly by a far-left mob. Among the seven people charged in connection with the crime are two men employed as parliamentary assistants by Melenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise (LFI)

One might have expected Melenchon and LFI to have kept a low profile in the days after the death of the student.

Not a bit of it. They have shown scant sympathy for Deranque. On the contrary, Bruno Gaccio, an LFI candidate in next month’s local elections, this week described Deranque as “a big neo-Nazi arsehole.”

Deranque was a nationalist but not a neo-Nazi and the police have said he was not on their radar for........

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