The New York Times has interpreted a British newspaper sketch as if it were a serious news report. Patrick Kidd – parliamentary sketch writer for The Times – wrote of an Emmanuel Macron rally:

“My masters at school, I will be honest, had not properly prepared me for the task of following an hour-long speech in rapid French. Mr Macron did not ask for directions to la gare once, for example. Nor did he invite anyone in the audience to come to une boum chez lui ce week-end. He didn’t even say “zut” or “bof”. One wondered if he was French at all.”

But in a brilliant example of our ‘separation by a common language’, the gray lady missed the joke. In an online photo essay ominously titled ‘Will London Fall‘, Sarah Lyall wrote:

“He could not tell his readers exactly what Mr. Macron said, however, because, as he boasted in the article, he does not really speak French, although he studied it in school. But why should he make an effort, seemed to be the idea, when it is so easy to ridicule the French for being French, and when to be English is to feel superior to your neighbors?… “Mr. Kidd’s hauteur isn’t surprising, given that Mr. Murdoch’s papers and the rest of the country’s right-leaning news media have spent decades nurturing an ancient anti-Europe narrative long reflected in the Conservative Party’s Euroskeptic wing. If London, or at least much of London, has welcomed or tolerated all the changes, many people around Britain, particularly from older generations, have lamented that they no longer recognize the country of their childhoods.”

To which Mr Kidd replies this morning:

@Ned_Donovan Not sure I should take that from a paper that can’t even spell neighbour or sceptic — Patrick Kidd (@patrick_kidd) 11 April 2017

God bless the “failing New York Times”…

H/T: Ned Donovan