With Jack Straw widely tipped to become Foreign Secretary again in Gordon Brown’s first administration – proving that tenacity as well as talent is generally needed to recover one of the key ministries of state – the prospect of Margaret Beckett’s caravan being parked in the Quai d’Orsay this summer en route to her French summer holiday has significantly receded. That may be just as well, as Mrs Beckett’s consternation at being offered the post of foreign secretary by Tony Blair might have been repeated when she had to get down to serious policy issues with her new French counterpart.

Bernard Kouchner seems at first glance a curious choice for French Foreign Secretary by new President Sarkozy, as he is a high profile activist in the Socialist Party that fought against Sarkozy in the election tooth and nail.

However, they have a great deal in common. Kouchner was almost the only member of his party who backed the American and British invasion of Iraq, claiming that his country “should have gone along”, meaning that literally. Like Sarkozy, he believes in interventionalist politics, and is very pro-US, where his appointment among the few remaining hawks was regarded as manna from heaven.

In a curious sort of way, Kouchner is nudging France towards sending its soldiers to the front line in international conflicts at the very moment the US and the UK are desperately trying to disengage without loss of face and further loss of life. Whether he will really back bold words with crack troops, and test to the limit French public opinion, remains to be seen.

The United Nations is much less enthusiastic about Kouchner’s appointment, despite his past track record as an efficient, if insensitive, UN special envoy to Kosovo. This is because, put simply, Kouchner despises the lobby fodder of the General Assembly, the tin-pot dictatorships whose votes can be bought for dollars. He said in a deliberately provocative speech in 2004, “If a state is a dictatorship, then it is absolutely not worthy of the international community's respect.”

Add his well-worn maxim, "To change the law, you sometimes have to break the law" – his response to those who claimed the Iraq war was inherently illegal - and you have a man after George Bush’s heart. No wonder the Times columnist Daniel Finkestein, not noted for his espousal of pacifist policies, described Kouchner’s appointment as “A political moment for celebration”. It seems unlikely however that the Labour Government Mark Two, beset with Iraq disasters for several years, will be popping any champagne corks in Downing Street.

May 2007