🇬🇧🇫🇷🇺🇸🇩🇪 BORIS JOHNSON REVEALS HOW MACRON’S GIFT TO BIDEN ENDED UP GETTING WORLD LEADERS DRUNK Boris Johnson has shared a rather entertaining memory from the 2021 G7 summit in Cornwall, involving Emmanuel Macron, Joe Biden, Angela Merkel and a crate of French wine that didn’t quite reach its intended audience. According to Johnson, Macron approached Biden with a gift of Lafayette wine, named after the French general who helped American revolutionaries fight for independence from Britain. The historical irony was hardly lost on the then-British prime minister. Biden graciously accepted the gift. There was just one problem: he doesn’t drink alcohol. So Johnson and several other summit attendees took care of it. “We spent the evening, me, Merkel, the South African guy and a few others, getting really quite merry drinking Macron’s gift to Biden,” Johnson recalled. He was referring to South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who attended the summit as a guest. Johnson also had unexpectedly warm words for Merkel, the German chancellor with whom he had frequently disagreed over Brexit and European politics. “Merkel was very funny. I liked her.” The anecdote offers a glimpse of the less formal side of international diplomacy: a French president presenting an American president with a historically symbolic bottle of wine, only for a British prime minister, a German chancellor and their colleagues to end up drinking it instead. Not quite the diplomatic outcome Macron had planned, at least according to Johnson’s recollection.