When I moved to Britain from France 27 years ago, it was like stepping into a radically different world. The UK was an exciting, dynamic, go-getting boom-time economy that was embracing hard work, risk-taking and the nascent internet; socialist, sclerotic, inward-looking France was already in crisis, sliding into a gradual decline that would ultimately lead to 56 per cent of the electorate voting for an extreme-Left or extreme-Right party in the first round of the presidential election last week.

Many fundamental differences remain between the two nations. Britain can be proud to be self-governing again, we don’t go on strike, our record on integrating immigrants is incomparably better and we have no truck with political extremists. Less positively, we still can’t build enough homes, unlike the French and their lotissements in every town and village, and we remain irrationally attached to the underperforming NHS monolith.

But as anybody who observes both la France Périphérique and Paris can attest, it is the gradual political, social, economic and cultural convergence, the increasing similarities with Britain, that are now most striking. The UK has become a lot more French, mostly not in a good way; at the same time, the French lower middle class has embraced some positive aspects of Anglo-American suburban culture, and the elites have become more globalised. France’s changes have been insufficient, and are usually rejected by the majority: the country is on the brink of extreme social strife, its economy stagnant and its prospects bleak. The difference is that Britain, too, is now inert: we face years of 1 per cent or so economic growth, down from 3 per cent or more during the good years, with all the toxic fighting over resources that this will entail.

As British governments turned their backs on free markets and cultural conservatism from the late 1990s, the gulf between our two societies narrowed significantly. Now, in a stunning paradox, Boris Johnson, the Brexiteer who was meant to reverse this process and allow us to experiment, to change, to plough our own furrow, has accelerated this harmonisation. It’s not just the TGV-style HS2: it’s the green agenda, the bureaucracy, the taxes, the public spending, the nationalisations and the interventionism.

Johnson is even a British version of Emmanuel Macron: a one-man Grand Coalition, a fusion of centre-Left and centre-Right politics. Both used revolutionary and populist means, strategy and language to seize power, only to largely maintain the declinist status quo. Their apparent radicalism was a market opportunity rather than a passionate belief.

Macron smashed the mainstream parties that were the bedrock of the Fifth Republic; his replacement party, La République En Marche!, is purely a vehicle for his personal ambitions. He’s an uber-centrist whose only appeal is that he isn’t an extremist.

Johnson used Vote Leave to seize power, but has subsequently attempted to turn the Tory party into a Blairite-style people’s government, with cakeism added to triangulation. Both men are flamboyant and mesmerising, veering “Left” or “Right” when it suits them. Both draw support from older voters: in Britain, the under-40s back Labour and in France Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Johnson’s task was to rebuild Britain’s institutions, realign the elites with the public and reboot our economy and society, triggering an explosion of wealth creation. None of this has happened: the Brexit dividend – a freedom to reform radically – remains almost entirely uncashed, almost all tax and spend changes have damaged the UK’s competitiveness, often severely, and there has been no meaningful deregulation, no attempt at turbocharging our economic growth. Britain’s decline is accelerating again.

Macron had a similar challenge: like in the UK, areas outside of metropolitan centres are in the doldrums. France has its own Red Wall. The French president failed to help la France d’en bas or to tackle dislocation and crime: he has performed better than the appalling Francois Hollande, but there have been no meaningful differences between his failed quinquennat and the equally useless Nicolas Sarkozy or Jacques Chirac eras. He pulled off a couple of supply-side reforms – not least ditching much of the wealth tax, one reason why unemployment is lower – but presided over a further vandalisation of the education system, embraced extreme environmentalism and made many other catastrophic errors. Johnson and Macron both promised a radical rupture, and neither have delivered.

France has long been the most pessimistic country in the West, dragged down by weariness, a lack of trust, an unhappiness about life and a sense of powerlessness at preventing everything from getting worse.

Britain is falling into the same trap: we are losing the optimism we regained after the Falklands War and the Thatcherite revolution. Johnson, whose joie de vivre once defined him, can no longer sell hope. The collapse in real incomes has combined with a sense of drift and alienation to hammer the spirits of many Tory voters.

We used to believe that we could do anything: now it feels as if the machine is programmed to say no. We can’t fix queues in Dover or force civil servants to go to the office or stop woke activists from ruining museums or build nuclear power stations faster. Nobody is in charge, and the public will is defiled. Ideological minorities and incompetent, untouchable apparatchiks rule, like in France: pessimism is understandably rife.

Equally predictably, voters in both countries are furious with their elites. The Conservatives, and the Prime Minister, are being damaged far more severely by Partygate than many MPs realise. The risk is that the public becomes French on this matter as well, and that trust collapses permanently, replaced by cynicism and conspiratorial thinking. The Tories led by 32 points on the economy in December 2019 but are now polling equally to Labour. As to the French, they will probably reelect Macron, but extremely reluctantly, and another gilet jaune moment is likely at some point after the election.

Yet if Macron can hope for reelection, the Tories may not be so lucky. To paraphrase the French president, he may well be able to continue to emmerder his enemies for another five years; Johnson will need more than luck if he is to survive that long in No 10.