The Dauphin of France

I spent the day with Jordan Bardella. Could 2027 signal a new Entente Cordiale with a Bardella Presidency and Farage as UK PM?

Every now and then politics churns out a good un.

Conveyor belts of grey, overly polished suits who are all schooled to circumlocute during interviews and mimic the same infuriating hand gesture (which appears as though they are dealing invisible cards while making a point) makes one rather fatigued by what feels like constant gaslighting.

And then along comes authenticity, and it poleaxes you with the sheer audacity of someone actually answering a question thoughtfully alongside a significant helping of bespoke personality.

I met Bardella. And I was poleaxed.

Not because of swagger, arrogance and assertiveness. Quite the opposite.

Don't get me wrong, the confidence is there. Tell me of any other 30 year old pitched to become the next President of a G7 nation and then tell me that that person doesn't have a spine of steel. But because with Bardella, the professorial calmness is at odds with both his age, and appearance.

Here is a man who wouldn't look out of place on the cover of GQ, or on a moody black and white billboard advertising a watch only billionaires have heard of. But his assurance doesn't come from showmanship nor arrogance. It comes from conviction. As though he looks at the world's problems and the purveyors of our shared European meltdown with a sort of fatherly disappointment.

Thus it was observing his interview with Nick Robinson. The back and forth was interconnected with a live translator via headset. As Nick posed a question there was a lag time as the translator put into French what was being asked where you could observe in real-time slight differentials in facial expression, reaction and rumination.

There was a moment when Robinson was listing French footballers and asking whether Bardella thought they were ‘French’, a gotcha move to catch out a racist. See! They are black and Muslim, but they are French! Aha!

With each name drop the discrete dimples on Bardella's cheeks would deepen, with an attitude rather like a parent finding it both irritating yet entertaining when a child asks what to an adult seems like an idiotic question.

After the 40 minute sit down, Bardella asks as they leave the studios why the BBC are still asking about Jean Marine Le Pen, a name even the French press stopped incanting a decade ago. All of a sudden the youthfulness poked out in the form of wanting to understand, wanting to learn. The blustering age-based weariness of Farage at such banal cross-sectioning was yet to take root in his French protegé 30 years his junior.

But in all other respects, here was an individual who knew his convictions, facts, policy positions and data with precocious assurance.

What is surprising is that Bardella is not a polished PPE Sciences-Po model scholar, honed in University debating societies, primed with quips, attack lines and Latin one liners to land a sucker punch. All too often these performative characters crumble when it is rudely revealed little conviction exists behind the veneer of a Public School education. No. Much like Farage, Bardella didn't get a degree. Unlike Farage, he hails from immigrant stock brought up in the banlieu, rather than a stockbroker's son brought up in the Home Counties.

Unlike Farage, Bardella seems less taken with the idea of being a Bonviveur. The glass of white wine at lunch went observedly untouched as multiple bottles came and got drained by everyone else.

How does a 30 year old cope without being able to do the sort of things other men his age enjoy? Bardella entered politics in his mid twenties and has had his life studied ever since.

I asked him, as he had make up applied at the BBC, how he finds it. Intense? Stressful?

Not much privacy - especially in a world where everyone has a smartphone. That will be very hard for his wife, he says with a beatific poise of genuine concern.

Do you have a wife? I ask.

It is something he very much wants to do, and seemingly soon.

I wondered what the pillow talk would be like. An analysis of French gilts? How to legally traverse ECHR judgements restricting deportations?

But somewhere behind the measured front is an easy smile - and mischievous laugh. Someone seemingly impossible to either trip up, or genuinely dislike.

There is something altogether rather perfect about Bardella. It suddenly becomes apparent that he never was Le Pen's project. Remarkable men like Bardella are born to be projected to some sort of predestined greatness. They really don't come along very often.

And if we are lucky, Europe will have Jordan in the Elysee and the spiritual Godfather of Nigel in Number 10.

The Old Dog and the Young Pup.

Both ready to learn new tricks. And save The West.