Marine Le Pen could have made a clean break with Vladimir Putin’s Russia on Thursday night. She could have thrown her weight behind Ukraine, arguing that the mass slaughter of civilians changes everything.

She could even have outflanked him by demanding that France gets off the fence and offers more than token support. Had she done so, she might have parried Mr Macron’s killer line on her bankers in Moscow. But the pro-Kremlin reflex runs too deep in her family and her party.

The Russia policies of Macron and Le Pen are similar. Both want to draw Putin away from a Chinese alliance. Both want Russia in the European security system to counterbalance Beijing and Washington.

Macron has had his own flirtations with the Russian dictator, inviting him on holiday without consulting EU allies. He scoffed at US and UK intelligence warnings about the military build-up last year, refusing to join efforts to beef up Ukraine’s defences as a deterrent.

His posture – the core European posture – was one reason why Putin thought he could get away with an invasion. Macron’s chats even after the bombing of Kyiv tells us that his preference – like Le Pen’s preference – is a “Minsk 3” soft capitulation by Ukraine, followed by a “reset” and a return to business as usual.

The exchange on Europe was the most revealing moment. Macron unconsciously conflated the EU with the Franco-German couple as if the terms were interchangeable, and as if the rest of the EU-27 were decorative.

But the Paris-Berlin axis has been dysfunctional for years. It is the EU’s most corrosive pathology. The reason Germany was able to impose austerity overkill on Club Med and commandeer EU bodies as debt collectors during the Great European Depression from 2010 to 2015 was because successive French governments went along meekly, knowing the policies were calamitous.

They went along too as Berlin flouted the spirit and law of EU energy directives. They tolerated its deal with Gazprom, which gave German heavy industry a structural competitive advantage over EU rivals.

Mr Macron is so wedded to the legacy doctrine of Franco-German condominium that he will not now confront Berlin over weapons deliveries and a total energy embargo.

The perennial irritant of the Franco-German axis – one fait accompli after another – is what slowly undermined support for the European project in Britain. Now state-to-state relations between Britain and France are at the lowest ebb since the Fashoda crisis in 1898.

This diplomatic frost is Macron’s choice. He has chosen to be the enemy of Brexit Britain in a way that no other EU leader has, both for ideological reasons but also because the rosbifs are an exploitable foil for internal politics.

Macron seemed to think he could cherry-pick post-Brexit relations, expecting intimate defence ties to continue unchanged, even as he kicked Britain in the teeth on everything else. 

He threatened to cut off our electricity interconnectors. He saw to it that the Chinese Communist Party secured better terms on financial services. But as he discovered with the AUKUS submarine deal, you cannot have “le beurre et l’argent du beurre” (cakeism).