France’s Chicac Insults The British

French President was at dinner and he was on a roll – and not the kind you eat.

Jacques Chirac, not realizing his comments were recorded, made stand-up style comments unusually blunt for a French President, even one governing in a time of accentuated Anglo-French tensions:

Anglo-French tensions heightened last night after Jacques Chirac delivered a series of insults to Britain as London and Paris fought to secure the 2012 Olympic Games and faced fresh disagreement at the G8 summit.

The president, chatting to the German and Russian leaders in a Russian cafe, said: “The only thing [the British] have ever given European farming is mad cow.” Then, like generations of French people before him, he also poked fun at British cuisine.

“You can’t trust people who cook as badly as that,” he said. “After Finland, it’s the country with the worst food.”

“But what about hamburgers?” said Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, referring to America.

“Oh no, hamburgers are nothing in comparison,” Mr Chirac said.

Mr Putin and Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, laughed. Mr Chirac then recalled how George Robertson, the former Nato secretary general and a former defence secretary in Tony Blair’s Cabinet, had once made him try an “unappetising” Scottish dish, apparently meaning haggis.

“That’s where our problems with Nato come from,” he said.

Sounds like Mr. Chirac was talking a lot of crepe to me…But Schroder and Putin reportedly laughed. Still, the Telegraph goes on:

Unfortunately for the leaders, all of whom will be guests of Britain at the G8 summit opening at Gleneagles tomorrow, the remarks were recorded by a journalist without their knowledge and published in the French newspaper Liberation.

No 10 reacted with disbelief, saying it would not respond to such undiplomatic comments. British officials were particularly angered by the mad cow remark, saying that France had exacerbated the BSE crisis by refusing to accept British beef after it had been declared safe.

France didn’t take the beef because even though England said it was safe, France felt England was giving it a bum steer..