Australia’s outspoken deputy prime minister has told President Macron of France to “get over” his anger in relation to a cancelled submarine deal that caused a diplomatic crisis.
Barnaby Joyce implied that Macron’s anger was overblown given that “we didn’t steal an island, we didn’t deface the Eiffel Tower”.
Yesterday the French leader accused Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, of lying to him over the deal.
Australia enraged France by cancelling a contract worth more than £40 billion in September in favour of an alternative three-way pact with the US and Britain, known as Aukus, to supply it with nuclear-powered submarines.
Asked by an Australian reporter at the G20 summit in Rome last night whether he thought Morrison had lied to him about the deal, Macron said: “I don’t think. I know.”
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Joyce, who is acting prime minister while Morrison attends the Cop26 Glasgow climate conference, said that it was time that Macron moved on.
“We didn’t steal an island, we didn’t deface the Eiffel Tower. It was a contract,” he said. “And contracts have terms and conditions and one of those terms and conditions and propositions is that you might get out of the contract.”
Morrison later denied he had lied and said that he had explained to Macron over dinner at the Élysée Palace in Paris in June that the submarines to be supplied by the French company Naval Group would fall short of Australia’s needs.
“I was very clear that the conventional submarines were not going to be able to meet our strategic interests and we were going to have to make a decision in our national interest,” Morrison said.
Macron said that world leaders must treat each other with “respect,” adding: “You have to behave in line and consistently with this value.” He described Australia’s withdrawal as a “stab in the back”. He has recalled France’s ambassadors from the US and Australia.
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Macron and Morrison crossed paths at the G20 but it is understood that they did not meet one-to-one. In a phone call last week Macron told him that a “relationship of trust” had been broken over the deal.
Relations between Macron and President Biden have mended much more quickly, with the US leader admitting to his French counterpart that Washington had been “clumsy” in the way it had handled the deal. He said: “We have no better ally than France.”
Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, made an unscheduled visit to meet Macron while in Paris last month in an attempt to repair relations.
After the meeting, the Élysée Palace said the session with Blinken, who grew up in Paris and speaks French, had “helped restore trust between France and the United States”.
While Biden conceded that the US should have kept the French informed about the Aukus deal, Boris Johnson took a different approach, accusing Macron of behaving like a jilted lover.
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Lord Ricketts, Britain’s former national security adviser and a former head of the Foreign Office, has criticised the UK’s decision to sign the deal, describing it as “opportunistic” and an unnecessary humiliation of France.
He said that Britain had created “real problems” with its handling of the deal, which had left France “feeling bitter and humiliated” and showed the UK “turning our back on Europe”. Anger in France at Australia was “more than play acting and is quite serious,” he said.
