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 of these men inherited had been comprehensively stripped long before they arrived.

Consider what De Gaulle actually had to work with. The Fourth Republic’s implosion handed him a clean constitutional slate and an emergency mandate the Fifth Republic still trades on. The trente glorieuses delivered annual growth close to five per cent. A still-meaningful franc zone, a nuclear programme financed at a defence burden closer to five per cent of GDP than to Macron’s two, and a dollar-centred world order he could raid rather than inherit. When his February 1965 press conference denounced the dollar’s “unilateral facility” and he demanded gold in exchange for France’s dollar reserves, he was drawing on a room still full of furniture. The veto at the Élysée in 1963, the empty chair at Brussels, the withdrawal from NATO’s integrated command — each was an act of independence made possible by a state whose sovereignty had not yet been pawned.

Macron’s room is rather barer. He governs with no parliamentary majority inside a eurozone that has already priced away most of France’s monetary independence; the European Central Bank’s rulebook does for him what the franc once did for De Gaulle, but in reverse. He raised the pension age at extraordinary political cost because the alternative was a debt trajectory the bond market would discipline within the year. He pushed “strategic autonomy” not because he lacks ambition but because American engagement can no longer be treated as a fixed feature of the landscape. Starmer’s room is barer still. The gilt market has a two-week attention span — as Liz Truss’s mini-budget and her seven-week premiership demonstrated in 2022 — which is why Rachel Reeves governs to the bond desks before the backbenchers. The defence establishment Labour inherited had already been stripped to the walls across the Cameron–Osborne austerity years, the Johnson spending spree, and the Truss mini-budget — each cheered on, in its day, by Tombs’s paper.

There is, too, an unacknowledged politics in Tombs’s framing. He has been among the more articulate intellectual architects of Brexit — a project sold on precisely the grandeur-and-sovereignty register he now laments the absence of. If the “little men” critique were applied consistently, it would have to ask whether the 2016 referendum was an exercise of British national agency or the largest clearance sale in the United Kingdom’s post-imperial history. One cannot congratulate a country for selling off its furniture and then berate the next tenant for the emptiness of the rooms.

[https://aspectsofhistory.com/author_interviews/britain-in-and-out-of-europe-robert-tombs-interview/]

Tombs’s real complaint, stripped of its heroic vocabulary, is that managerial leaders under binding constraints produce managerial politics. That is true, and it is dispiriting. But De Gaulle’s genius was not posture; it was his refusal to spend sovereignty cheaply — the force de frappe kept independent of NATO, the veto on British accession, the empty chair that forced a renegotiation of European voting rules. Properly read, De Gaulle is not a rebuke to Macron and Starmer but a warning to their critics: greatness in statecraft is measured in what a leader refuses to give away, not in the volume at which they speak.

Perhaps the problem is not that the men are small. Perhaps it is that, somewhere between the Diamond Jubilee and the referendum, we stopped noticing that the room had been emptied — and that the auctioneers are still writing the obituaries.

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