The pressures of electoral politics can sometimes prompt even the most zealous leaders to sacrifice cherished principles. Take Emmanuel Macron, the French president, who yesterday saw fit to compromise his strong enthusiasm for the European Union.

In a speech in Paris, Mr Macron openly condemned an attempt by the European Commission to promote “nonsense”. He was referring to its initiative, now disbanded, to fight a woke war by banning gendered words and phrases, such as “man-made” and “ladies and gentlemen”, and replace them with neutral and supposedly inoffensive terms like “human-induced” and “dear colleagues”.

The president openly criticised the Commission, stating that “a Europe that comes to explain to people what words they should or shouldn’t say is not a Europe to which I totally adhere. It’s nonsense, basically”. Yet this is the same individual who has openly called for closer fiscal and political integration between member states, who champions “the integrity of the single market”, and who despises Brexit as an insult to and repudiation of everything he holds most dear.

Macron faces presidential elections next year and is trying to undermine the campaigns of Right-wing candidates Éric Zemmour and Marie Le Pen. A war on woke appeals to conservative opinion, particularly because it is viewed as a trans-Atlantic import in a country where suspicion of the United States is deeply held.

But by openly taking sides in this conflict and opposing the march of wokeness across our cultural battlefields, Macron is challenging not just its failed bid to alter terminology, but the EU’s very foundations.

He is inadvertently siding, for example, with the governments of Hungary and Poland, which have accused Brussels of imposing its “wokeness”, especially on LGBTQ rights, and openly defied it. Yet only recently, at an EU summit in June, he urged the EU to fight a “cultural” and “civilizational” battle to stop the rise of illiberal ideas, which he alleged threatened core European values.

Macron’s divided loyalties – between the EU and his own electorate – have become clear before. After a French school teacher was beheaded by Islamists in October 2020, his government championed free expression, even “offensive” views like those supposedly held by the Hungarians and Poles. And Mr Macron also came close to challenging one of the sacrosanct principles of the European project – freedom of movement – when he promised to step up police surveillance of French borders to tackle the “growing threat” of terrorism.

How, then, can Macron tread this political tightrope between his own electability and his most cherished values?

He could do worse than emulate the very man he has recently picked out for fierce criticism – Boris Johnson. Over the years, our own Prime Minister has proved highly adept at appealing to many opposing strands of opinion. Although he infuriated the woke by referring to veiled Islamic women as “letter boxes”, his article never condemned them. And he was always liberal about immigration even though it was central to the Brexit campaign.

In fact, over the next few months, we must expect French presidential rhetoric to become increasingly Johnsonian. Macron has recently urged his fellow French to “defend the values of democracy”, even though this is not something the EU, which has obstructed and even ignored referendums, has championed. Instead, such references are already resembling the rhetoric of Brexit campaigners who wanted to “take back control”. Of course, such political role reversals are hardly uncommon, but in this case the irony is particularly delicious.

RT Howard is the author of ‘Power and Glory: France’s Secret Wars Against Britain and America 1945-2016’