Prime minister meets centrist politician in Downing Street as spokesman confirms UK has no plans to engage with Marine Le Pen

Theresa May has met the centrist French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron in London while continuing her policy of refusing to engage with his rival Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front National.



The prime minister hosted the presidential hopeful in Downing Street on Tuesday after he requested a meeting while in the UK to speak to 3,000 French voters in Westminster.



May’s spokesman dismissed the idea that it showed favouritism towards his candidacy.



He confirmed it was still the government’s position that it does not have relations with Le Pen, one of the three main contenders along with Macron and François Fillon, the rightwing candidate.

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The move is fairly unusual but not unprecedented; Tony Blair met the French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 during his campaign.

Macron’s London trip and his rally for supporters near Westminster comes as he attempts to get his campaign back on track after a troubled week. Polls show Le Pen with an increasingly solid lead in the first round of the election, with Macron slipping back to equal standing with the beleaguered Fillon.



Fillon has vowed to continue his campaign despite a preliminary investigation into whether he gave his wife a fake parliamentary job from public funds.

All polls suggest Le Pen will be defeated in the presidential second round in May. But this week an Opinionway survey for Les Echos showed the gap was narrowing – with Macron versus Le Pen on 58% to 42%, and Fillon versus Le Pen on 56% to 44%.

Macron, who is running a delicate balancing act with a platform that is “neither left nor right”, has been accused by his opponents of fleeing serious argument about policy by failing to set out a concrete list of policy proposals or say how he intends to pay for them. Later this week, he will set out how he plans to cut French public spending while also committing to boosting police numbers, prison places and teacher numbers.

On a trip to Algeria last week, Macron provoked a row after he said France’s colonisation of the country was a “crime against humanity”. At the weekend he apologised if he had offended French nationals who had to leave Algeria after independence in 1962 but said: “We must face this common, complex past if we want to move on and get along.”

He was also forced to clarify his position on same-sex marriage after saying conservatives who had taken to the streets to oppose its legalisation by François Hollande had been “humiliated” by the left.

Several French presidential candidates are working on building their international status in campaign visits abroad. Le Pen, whose offices were raided on Monday as part of an investigation into “fake jobs” involving the misuse of European funds, was in Lebanon this week in an attempt to add to her international credibility on her first official visit to a head of state and her first foreign leader’s handshake, with the president, Michel Aoun, in Beirut. The Socialist party’s Benoît Hamon, fourth in the polls, was in Portugal meeting members of the leftwing coalition government in an attempt to show that warring factions of the left can be reconciled.

London has become a compulsory campaign stop for French presidential candidates seeking to boost their international credentials and court the growing expat vote. It is home to about 300,000 of the 400,000 French people in Britain,which would make it equal to France’s sixth biggest city in voting terms.

Sarkozy started the trend for “Paris-on-Thames” campaign rallies a decade ago, urging expats to come home and saying: “France is still your country even if you’re disappointed by it.”

The stakes are even higher now that French expats are able to vote for their own MPs in overseas constituencies. The seat for northern Europe, which represents French people in the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia and the Baltic states, is held by a Socialist.