Robert Tombs, one of our finest historians of Franco-British relations, has surveyed the present moment and found it small. Writing in The Telegraph, he complains that France and Britain — “great powers brought low” — are stuck with lightweight leaders in Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, when what both nations cry out for is a heroic figure in the mould of De Gaulle. The charge will land comfortably in the clubs and comment threads where declinism has become a shared vocabulary. It is also, I think, wrong in a particular and instructive way.

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/15/france-and-britain-are-great-powers-brought-low-little-men/]

The argument confuses the size of the man with the size of the room he has been left to work in.

Concede first the twenty per cent Tombs deserves. Macron’s 2024 dissolution was a self-inflicted wound of historic proportions, and Starmer has governed with a political tin ear that has soured a landslide inside two years. Neither is De Gaulle, and neither would claim to be. But even if one granted Tombs every point about personal ability, the structural case against his thesis would survive intact — because the room each........

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