JACQUES CHIRAC may be forced to eat his words tonight as he sits down with the Queen and other G8 leaders to a banquet of the finest Scottish fare.

The menu is a tightly guarded secret, but it is expected to include local venison and seafood. There will be no haggis, a dish that the French President once declared “unappetising”.

Andrew Fairlie, head chef at the five-star Gleneagles Hotel, who trained in France under Michel Guérard and has been named Scotland’s Chef of the Year, was preparing a showcase of Scottish produce. His signature dish is lobster smoked over old whisky barrels.

“I won’t be doing anything special,” he said. “It is a matter of sticking to what you know and maintaining the standards we have already set.” M Chirac, in Singapore to support Paris’s bid for the 2012 Olympics, went to ground after being besieged at Raffles Hotel by reporters interested only in his comments about British food.

“One cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine,” he told Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, and Gerhard Schrö- der, the German Chancellor. M Chirac, his face like thunder, was asked by a reporter yesterday: “Did you make disparaging remarks about Britain?” He stayed silent as another, using the French slang for Britons, asked him: “Do you like rosbif?” The French President tried to divert attention back to the Olympics. “I have come here to support one candidacy. We are in the Olympic world. That means fair play; that means that the best should win; and that is what I want. Naturally I want the best to be Paris.” He then escaped into the hotel and made no contact with Tony Blair, who was in the hotel next door and refused to rise to the French bait at a London bid press conference. However, when M Chirac’s comments were read to him, he quipped that he would “be staying in Singapore for the rest of the week now”.

The two leaders will meet at the Queen’s banquet in Gleneagles tonight. The Queen can be very pointed when she chooses or approves a menu. When she entertained the International Olympic Committee inspectors assessing London’s bid for the Games against arch-rival Paris, she ensured that the Buckingham Palace menu featured English or New World wines only.

Ben Bradshaw, the Environment Minister, who represents the UK on the EU agriculture council, said M Chirac’s views showed that he was “old thinking and old Europe”. Mr Bradshaw changed his itinerary yesterday to visit the showcase for British food at the Royal Agriculture Show in Warwickshire.

He criticised the French leader’s remark that “mad cow” disease was Britain’s biggest contribution to European agriculture, saying that there were now more cases of the disease in France than in the UK. In 2003 there were 37 positive BSE results from cattle tests in French abattoirs compared with 19 in the UK.

Egon Ronay, the food critic, said that M Chirac deserved to be served nothing more than humble pie after his unscripted remarks that Britain served the worst food in Europe outside Finland. “A man full of bile is not fit to pronounce on food. No other country in the world has improved its cuisine more than Britain has in recent times,” Mr Ronay said.

An award-winning Dundee butcher has sent two haggis to M Chirac for him to try during the G8. George Ferrier, manager of Gilbert Grossett and Sons, said: “I think Chirac has a damn fine cheek sneering at our haggis. After all, they think that snails and frogs’ legs are a delicacy.”

Tim Johnston, a Scot who runs Juveniles, a chic bistro in the Paris Bourse district, said that he sold up to five kilograms of haggis a fortnight to his “highly cultured” Parisian clientele. “My patrons absolutely love it,” Mr Johnston said.

M Chirac apparently had no problem with British food when Tony Blair took him to a pub near his Sedgefield constituency in 2000. Andrew Brown, French-trained owner and chef of the County Hotel in Aycliffe, Co Durham, recalled that the French President had “cleared his plate” of shoulder of Northumberland lamb. He also declined French wines for lager and a cup of English tea.

THE FINNS REPLY

‘The comments by Jacques Chirac can only be explained by the fact that he has not visited Finland often enough and that he listens too much to Silvio Berlusconi’
— Ilta-Sanomat daily newspaper

‘It is also true that the French are the dirtiest people. They do not buy a lot of soap and for that our President will not insult them’
— Hans Valimaki, owner of Chez Dominique, a restaurant in Helsinki with two Michelin stars

‘Even the French no longer take (Chirac) seriously’
— Erkki Toivanen, a journalist

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