Jacques continues his diplomatic mission
After showing up 1/2 hr late to the Windsor Castle dinner and show, the Telegraph had some fun at Jacques's expense.

Missing from the Court Circular, then, was: "On their way to Windsor, the President of the French Republic attended a water-main burst and delay given in the Cromwell Road by the Mayor, Mr Kenneth Livingstone, and the cast of the London rush hour traffic jam with road-rage stabbings… After Dinner, the President of the French Republic and Madame Jacques Chirac slept through a special performance of Les Misérables. The President of the French Republic told the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh that they knew full well that he had always hated the show and that it was proof of French good taste that it had been running for a generation in London and had flopped in Paris.

"He added that when the Queen next visited Paris on a state visit he would, after dinner, show the video of France beating England in the 2004 Six Nations rugby. The Queen replied that one looked forward to that very much. The Duke of Edinburgh told the President of the French Republic that, according to what he read about crooked French politicians, the President of the French Republic would by that time be in prison.

"The President of the French Republic and Madame Jacques Chirac said that they were not going to take that from someone whose original surname, Battenberg, suggested that he was un Boche. The President of the French Republic and the Duke of Edinburgh then participated, with Madame Jacques Chirac, in a joint scuffle."

On a more serious vein, (via Betsy) the Times of London is not amused at all by Jacques's attitude, and goes as far as saying,

France is more than M Chirac and the Entente deeper than the current spat. Britain is right to celebrate friendship with its closest neighbour. It should politely ignore the bad manners of France’s President and wish M Sarkozy godspeed.

Allow me to remind you that Sarkozy continues to show up in the French polls as their most popular politican.

Andrew Coulson's a little more blunt, posting, Netherlands: "Why is Chirac such a Prick?". Dennis Boyles writes about Jacques’s Cracks

That, of course, is exactly what we should by now expect from Chirac — the notion that if it's not a bribe, it's not a deal. It would never occur to Chirac that what Blair got in exchange for liberating Iraq had nothing to do with the U.S. What Blair got was what he thought he'd get — the knowledge that he had done the right thing for his own country and for others.

What an unsophisticated way to see the world, non? A French leader would never say, "Either you are with us, or you're against us." In French, it translates like this: "Either you give us something, or we are against you." Chirac's remark explains a great deal about the deep, permanent animosity between the U.S. and France. And thanks in part to Jacques' cracks, it's now an antagonism George W. Bush overlooks at his peril.

Boyles calls Jacques a cheap crook, but the evidence indicates he's a very expensive crook.