Thursday 9 May 2002

The radical centre?

The new French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin is a member of the Liberal Democracy party led by Alain Madelin whom I met in France last year. Over there, "liberal" means what it used to mean - unlike in Britain. But I was shocked to hear the news of Raffarin's appointment on the BBC in which he was descibed as "a Thatcherite, a centrist." What would Maggie think?