Is Emmanuel Macron a friend of the United Kingdom? Liz Truss said over the summer that she didn’t know, which was a reasonable response in the circumstances. This is a president surrounded by close advisors who hold Britain in barely disguised contempt.

Other than a brief pretend bromance with Boris Johnson, whom Macron promptly knifed in the back and called a clown, the president threatened to cut the electricity interconnection between France and Britain in a row over fish. His government takes millions from Britain in return for pretending to stop boatloads of migrants launching themselves across the channel. Macron has described Nato as brain dead and fantasised that its security role could be Europeanised. Beyond the rhetorical, his contribution to the Ukrainian war effort has been negligible.

Macron’s response to Truss’s uncertainty about him was to declare that her ambivalence would provoke serious problems. Yet Truss, with no discernible justification, has now declared Macron a friend.

‘I work very, very closely with President Macron and the French government and what we’re talking about is how the UK and France can work more closely together to build more nuclear power stations and to make sure that both countries have energy security in the future. We’re both clear the foe is Putin, who has through his appalling war in Ukraine threatened freedom and democracy in Europe and pushed up energy prices which we’re now all having to deal with.’

To cement her declaration of amity, Truss has rushed to participate in Macron’s European Political Community, a still rudimentary concept that the president intends to function as a sphere of European Union influence. He wants it to ‘build a strategic intimacy’ with all European countries, and to be a waiting room for countries such as Albania, Turkey and Ukraine, who have ambitions to become full members.

Macron is described by his own father as a master of seduction. Truss appears to have surrendered to his charm without a struggle. Macron, she declared without hesitation after the first meeting of this group in Prague, ‘is a friend’. Truss is what the Americans call, ‘a cheap date’. Indeed, she picked up the tab for her photo opp, affirming that taxpayers will pay France’s nationalised EDF £35 billion (certain to be vastly more) to build a new nuclear power station, Sizewell C. It will be modeled on the Hinkley Point C station being built by EDF, which is catastrophically over budget and overdue. In return, Britain has received nothing at all from Macron.

Truss arrived on the European stage at a time when Macron has been reduced to a shadow of his former stature. He’s annoyed or insulted inter alia the Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Swedes and Swiss. Re-elected reluctantly by French voters, he’s lost his majority in the National Assembly. His ally Angela Merkel has departed, leaving European energy policy in a shambles. His diplomacy with Putin has been a bust. His military has been defeated in Africa. His domestic political opponents on the left and right scent blood. Truss might have demanded more for bolstering him. Instead, she’s simply rolled over.