Britain won’t talk to France…

…if Marine Le Pen is elected President. Not if Lord Llewellyn, our man in Paris, has anything to do with that. He made this astonishing promise when talking to Parliament about the upcoming French election.

“With respect to the Front National, we have a policy of not engaging. There’s a long-standing policy,” he said. Asked whether this intransigent stance would change should Marine move into the Élysée Palace, he repeated: “That is the policy that has been the policy for many years and that is the policy.”

Since Ed Llewellyn became Lord Llewellyn in recognition of his loyal service as Dave Cameron’s Chief of Staff, one shouldn’t be surprised at the inept phrasing. But I’m still amazed that Her Majesty’s ambassador would make such a politically inane statement about the potential head of a (more or less) friendly state.

Since Lord Llewellyn has only been a diplomat for a few months, he hasn’t yet mastered the basics of his new profession. One such is trying to stay on speaking terms with heads of Western democracies, no matter how objectionable.

I suppose the urge to score cheap political points becomes irresistible after a few years rubbing shoulders with the likes of Dave. Lord Llewellyn clearly thinks that this particular point isn’t just cheap but free, for Marine stands no chance of putting him in an awkward position.

I wouldn’t be so sure. Le Pen is currently leading the Gaullist candidate François Fillon (not to be confused with François Villon, who isn’t standing in this election) by a slender margin, with the independent leftie Emmanuel Macron in the bronze medal position and the Socialist candidate having as much chance as the aforementioned François Villon.

However, if, as predicted, Fillon and Le Pen contest the two-horse second round, all other parties are expected to gang up on poor Marine to give Fillon a two-to-one landslide.

Yet Lord Llewellyn’s experience as an anti-Brexit shill ought to have taught him the dangers of complacency. If political polls were reliable, Britain’s membership in the EU would last as long as the EU itself (not too long, one hopes), and Hillary would be inaugurated on 20 January.

Odds-on favourites can lose, especially when they’re default candidates rather than charismatic leaders (which none of the French candidates is).

Fillon is a traditional Gaullist apparatchik, regarded for some unfathomable reason as an Anglophile libertarian. This first claim is puzzling, considering that he leads a party as institutionally committed to detesting the English as its founder was so committed personally.

De Gaulle sensed during the war that the English didn’t take him as seriously as he took himself, a slight that no Frenchman ever forgets. To make matters even worse, the British played a key role in liberating France, a good deed that de Gaulle set out to punish.

Fillon’s claim to Anglophilia mostly rests on his British wife Penelope. However, unlike my English wife Penelope, Mme Fillon is Welsh, an ethnicity that doesn’t automatically presuppose an all-abiding affection for the English.

Fillon is seen as something of a Thatcherite and, comparatively speaking, he is. After all, the other candidates are closer to Marx than to Hayek in their economic views. Since Fillon is merely committed to a huge, rather than gargantuan, state and favours a paltry 50 per cent marginal tax rate, rather than near total expropriation, he may come across as an economic libertarian.

But, as the French say, ‘comparison n’est pas raison’, contradicting their own philosopher Descartes who claimed that all knowledge is comparative. In any Anglophone country Fillon would be regarded as a rank socialist, which all French politicians really are. What’s undoubted is that Fillon is a great admirer of Putin, a sentiment hard to reconcile with libertarian Anglophilia.

At least his affection for Putin is disinterested, which is more than can be said for Le Pen, who has helped herself to Putin’s rouble and is hoping to do so again. What’s astounding about Marine is that she’s routinely described as right-wing.

She’s no such thing: her economic ideas place her to the left of Hollande. Le Pen’s politics is a cocktail of socialism, nationalism and demagogic populism. These are the hallmarks of fascism, the real ideology of the Front National.

Marine is more tactically aware than her father, which is why she underplays such endearing traits of her grassroots party as rabid anti-Semitism. But she’s a fruit fallen off the same tree.

The third candidate, Manny Macron, was Hollande’s finance minister. A few months ago, realising that the Socialist ship was sinking, Manny emulated the proverbial rodent and went independent.

By way of a parting shot he warned that Brexit would have the catastrophic consequence of turning Britain into a Jersey or Guernsey, Manny was undecided which. He didn’t specify whether that was a promise or a threat, a lamentable omission considering that both islands have a 20 per cent tax rate and no crime.

Standing against such opposition, and given the French propensity for supporting outrageous candidates like Hollande, Marine may well win, defying the polls and common sense.

The voters may experience the same rush of populist blood to the head as les Yankees did when voting for Trump. They may feel that neither Fillon nor Macron is sufficiently dissociated from the same establishment that’s ruining France.

That would make Lord Llewellyn eat either crow or his hat, whichever is his culinary preference. One thing is for sure: he wouldn’t be having that repast at the British embassy in Paris.