EMMANUEL MACRON has been likened to Napoleon in his love of grandeur - but he now seems as deluded as the Emperor was in his doomed march on Moscow. Keir Starmer accepted an invitation to dine with EU leaders in Brussels yesterday in order to push for a new defence and security pact with the EU — especially in light of Donald Trump’s push to persuade Ukraine and Russia to end the war and accept a deal.

The Prime Minister especially wants to impress upon other European leaders the need to keep up pressure, both economically and militarily, against Russia. Without it, the fear is that Putin could be allowed to come away from the Ukraine war claiming victory in the form of territorial gains — then turn his attention to other former parts of the Russian empire, such as the Baltic states. Macron, however, seems to have got it into his head that Starmer had come crawling to Brussels because Brexit has failed and he needs the EU to prop up Britain.

The French President apparently views Starmer as a “demandeur” — someone who is pleading for favours from a position of weakness. It cannot be a coincidence that the meeting for last night’s dinner took place at Brussels’ Palais D’Egmont. It was here that Edward Heath signed the Treaty of Accession in 1972 which took Britain into the European Economic Community. Macron probably thought that was quite the sly dig — Nigel Farage saw it for exactly what it was, calling it “deliberate and humiliating”.

The French leader is determined to seize any chance he can to pull Britain back into the regulatory orbit of the EU, to prevent us being able to take advantage of our freedoms outside the bloc, such as our ability to deregulate and to negotiate our own free trade deals. It is true that there are many people in Britain who share Macron’s view that Brexit has been a disaster and that Britain needs to align itself more with the EU if not rejoin.

But to sustain that view it is necessary to ignore what is going on across the Channel. Sure enough, the UK economy is flat-lining but the EU is hardly faring any better. Our economy last year grew by 0.9 per cent, the same as the Euro area. In France it was 0.7 per cent and Germany minus 0.2 per cent. It has been the same picture since we left the EU five years ago. Britain and France have grown at approximately the same, dismal rate, while Germany has done significantly worse.

The overall picture has been obscured by the pandemic, which closed down much of the world’s economy for months on end. Yet the US has managed to pull itself out of its Covid slump. The economy is growing and jobs are being created at an impressive rate. The French leader is determined to seize any chance he can to pull Britain back into the regulatory orbit of the EU, to prevent us being able to take advantage of our freedoms outside the bloc.

Britain’s other great problem is excessive government spending. But Macron can hardly point a finger at us for that because France is every bit as much up to its eyeballs in debt. The UK’s national debt stands at 100 per cent of GDP, while in France it is 108 per cent. The truth is that Britain and the EU are locked in the same cycle of decline. Productivity has hardly shifted since the 2008/09 recession.

It shouldn’t really be any wonder that we are struggling. No government of the past five years has made much of an effort to escape from the growth-suppressing economic model of the EU, with its over-regulation, high taxes and excessive workers’ rights. What Macron and other EU leaders really fear, however, is that a future UK government could seize the initiative and take full advantage of Brexit — turning us into the fabled “Singapore on Thames” that we heard so much about during the referendum campaign.

There is a good reason why they want to move quickly to try to entice Britain back under the thumb of the EU. Donald Trump is forcing Britain to pick a side by threatening a trade war with the EU, while holding out the possibility that Britain could be exempted from the kind of punitive tariffs which he has already imposed on imports from Mexico and Canada. We should be wary of taking the US President at his word but it could potentially put Britain in a privileged position of being able to trade reasonably freely with both the US and the EU — something which would attract investment to Britain.

We won’t achieve that, however, if we fall for the EU’s advances and allow ourselves to be sucked into some kind of EU-lite involving membership of the customs union and single market. To give Starmer credit, there is little to suggest that he is tempted by the EU’s overtures. On the contrary, he says he has ruled out a return to any kind of customs union. That would be the worst of all worlds, where we had to follow the EU’s rules but had no say in making them.