Alexei Navalny is being laid to rest in Moscow today, a fortnight after the Russian opposition leader was found dead in a gulag in the Arctic circle. His death prompted an outpouring of grief but also anger among Western leaders. Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron expressed their sadness at the news and their indignation, pointing the finger of blame for Navalny’s death at Vladimir Putin.

Navalny was a courageous man who paid a heavy price for his dissidence. So, too, did Jamal Khashoggi. The Saudi journalist was a fierce critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, using a monthly column in the Washington Post to denounce the de facto ruler of the kingdom. In October 2018, Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul where he was tortured, murdered and dismembered.

Macron is not alone in turning a blind eye to some of Qatar’s more dubious relationships

The West was outraged at the murder of Khashoggi, and Britain and France were among the countries demanding that those responsible ‘must be held to account’. In February 2021, the CIA released their findings on the killing: Khashoggi was murdered on behalf of bin Salman, who ‘approved’ the death because he regarded the journalist a threat to his rule.

The silence from Western leaders was deafening. According to the New York Times, president Joe Biden went quiet because the diplomatic cost of directly penalising Saudi Arabia’s crown prince was ‘too high’.

The following year in July, Biden ‘fist bumped’ the Crown Prince at a meeting in Jeddah, the same month that Macron invited bin Salman to dinner at the Elysée Palace. Macron hosted MSB shortly after a trip to Africa where he had lectured Cameroon about the immorality of doing any energy deals with Russia. ‘I too often see hypocrisy…in not knowing how to qualify a war,’ he declared.

This behaviour is the ‘politics of double standards’, a phrase coined in a recent interview by Laurent Bigot, a former senior civil servant in France’s Foreign Office. ‘It is no longer tolerated in Africa,’ he explained. As an example he contrasted France’s reaction to coups in Chad and Mali in 2021. They supported the coup in Chad, citing ‘exceptional circumstances’, but condemned the one in Mali, with Macron calling it ‘unacceptable’. The Chad coup was acceptable because it was led by Idriss Deby, whose family’s friendship with France goes back decades.

France’s ‘politics of double standards’ has been in evidence this week with the announcement of a strategic partnership deal with Qatar. As part of the agreement, the Gulf State will pour €10 billion (£8.6 billion) into start-ups and investment funds in France in the next six years.

The deal is an indication that Macron bears no grudge towards the Gulf State despite their moral and material support of Hamas, the terrorist organisation that five months ago slaughtered 42 French citizens in Israel.

At a recent commemoration in Paris to remember the dead, Macron described Hamas’s attack as ‘barbarism… which is fed by anti-Semitism’. On the very day that Hamas committed their barbarity, Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement declaring that they ‘held Israel solely responsible for the ongoing escalation due to its ongoing violations of the rights of the Palestinian people’. The Ministry called on ‘the international community to act urgently to compel Israel to stop its flagrant violations of international law’.

Not a word about the 1,200 men, women and children who had been butchered, but then why would the Qataris commiserate with Israel? They not only hosted Hamas’s leaders in Doha, but funded the terrorist organisation, doubling its aid to Gaza in 2021 to $360 million (£290 million). Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh said the money ‘proves the depth of the ties between the Palestinian and Qatari peoples’.

Macron is not alone in turning a blind eye to some of Qatar’s more dubious relationships (they are also on good terms with Putin) in the name of realpolitik. A few weeks ago, Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden visited Doha on official business and boasted that bilateral trade is currently worth £11.4 billion, up 29 per cent on 2024. Dowden said he was ‘keen to discuss with our partners the ways in which the UK can support Qatar in delivering its new “third national development strategy”‘.

Shortly before Dowden jetted off to Doha, Politico ran an investigative piece headlined: ‘On Hamas, what did Qatar know and when did it know it?’. In response to whether Qatar knew the attack on Israel was coming, the publication quoted a senior ‘intelligence official of a major European power’ as replying ‘we’re still looking into it’.

It is not only Qatar’s links to Hamas that should trouble the West; for many years they have been a financial and ideological backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose influence is spreading rapidly throughout Europe. In 2015, the then prime minister of France Manuel Valls declared that the time had come to combat ‘the discourse of the Muslim Brotherhood in our country’.

That fight never materialised because there is little fight left in the West. In 2021, Biden warned Putin that there would be ‘devastating consequences’ if Navalny died in Russian custody. That wasn’t long after he declared Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’ for murdering Khashoggi.

It’s said that the Chinese have a nickname for Macron; they call the French president ‘Macaron’ because like the biscuit he is hard on the outside and soft in the centre. The same could be said of all Western leaders.