Angry farmers offer a theme for the week – starting with the French at close quarters. Leaving the Eurotunnel at Calais en route to a wedding in the Alps, my car party encounters agricultural rage in the form of convoys of stationary trucks at all the port’s major exit points, as tractors blockade the autoroutes and police do nothing to shift them. Echoing recent protests in Germany, Poland and Romania, French farmers want better price protection, cheaper diesel, more import barriers, more aid from Brussels and less green regulation.

We’re lucky not to be sprayed with manure, as was happening elsewhere. The protests have support from the powerful CGT union on the left and Marine Le Pen on the right, the latter calling the Emmanuel Macron regime ‘the farmers’ worst enemies’.What’s most significant is that polls say farmers also have the sympathy of almost 90 per cent of French voters across the political spectrum. But in consumer economies dominated by supermarket buying power and government pursuit of free trade, there is no mechanism, or serious public will, or political incentive, to translate sympathy into higher food prices. So it’s easy to understand why these producers of vital sustenance, whatever the weather, whatever the politics, always feel they come off worse. No wonder they love to enmerder the motorists.

Canadian cousins

Trade talks between the UK and Canada have been suspended because our own farmers object to imports of hormone-treated beef and our Canadian cousins want hefty tariffs on British cheese and cars. Overall numbers are not large: £7.3 billion worth of Canadian goods vs £11.8 billion from the UK; within that total, the controversial cheese counts for less than £20 million.

But it’s obvious in principle that we should seek amicable, free-flowing trade relations with an ally such as Canada whose geopolitical interests and personal ancestries are so close to ours, as I witnessed in Toronto a couple of months ago. And yet it’s also obvious, as with the 2021 deal with Australia to which the UK’s National Farmers’ Union strenuously objected, that protectionism will raise its head every time, in every sector and direction.

Talks with India intended to win access for UK services as well as lower tariffs on goods are in their 14th round and running out of time before elections in both countries. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has scotched any hope of a US-UK trade deal while he’s still in office. Leaving aside the thorny issue of whether we’ll ever be better off seeking our own deals outside the EU, let me table a different question. In this post-globalisation era, are not domestic food and energy security far more important national objectives than the mirage of free trade?

Post Office runners

Headhunters are searching for a chairman of the Post Office to follow Henry Staunton, who held the title for just over a year but has been shown the door by Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch. Almost anyone with an honest face, a sense of social duty and a basic grasp of governance would be an improvement on the recent run of Post Office bosses, but let me offer some names for the bookies.

Dame Sharon White, due to step down from running the John Lewis Partnership in a year’s time, must be a dead cert for this shortlist – but Dame Alison Rose, recently of NatWest, is still a little too toxic. If there’s nothing like a dame when it comes to filling such a sensitive vacancy, I’d put shorter odds on Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia, the former Virgin Money boss who now chairs the non-executive board of HMRC.

But when gravitas is required, lords are good too – and I’d venture a fiver on Lord Bilimoria, the Cobra Beer entrepreneur turned champion of small business. Or better, the former barrister and MP who campaigned on behalf of wrongly convicted sub-postmasters long before their cause became fashionable: step forward the wise owl Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom.

Wounded tiger?

The only surprise about the liquidation ordered by a Hong Kong court of China Evergrande Group, the world’s most indebted property developer with more than $300 billion of liabilities, is that it took so long to happen. A liquidation petition was first filed by an aggrieved investor 18 months ago, the company’s bonds are all but worthless, and its billionaire founder is under criminal investigation.

What happens next depends on whether Chinese mainland courts support their Hong Kong brethren or – under orders from above – muddy the process for as long as it takes Beijing to concoct a bailout of China’s entire real estate sector, in which no one knows either how many other busted big players might follow Evergrande or how many banks have been ruined by lending to them. As to how all this affects China’s behaviour as a global economic empire-builder and regional military threat, we don’t need an ancient Chinese proverb to tell us the wounded tiger is always more dangerous.

Escape route

The French tractors moved on to surround and ‘starve’ Paris – and if you’re stuck there as supplies run out, restaurant tips from me won’t help. But if the siege engines return to Calais, my advice is to tell your satnav to find the suburban Route de Coulogne which joins a scenic single-track canal towpath towards Saint-Omer and onwards until you can rejoin a highway.

We were tempted to pull in at a rough but promisingly named canalside bar, Au Train d’Enfer (‘The Hell Train’), for banter with local trade unionists. But dinner awaited 400 miles ahead in the elegant Hotel aux Terraces at Tournus, amid prosperous Burgundian terroir. The other side of France, as it were – and well worth a long day in the car.