AMERICAN hostility to France reached new heights yesterday when the remains of US servicemen buried in Normandy were dragged into the heat of battle over Iraq.

A Florida congresswoman introduced a Bill on Capitol Hill that would allow the families of Second World War dead to dig up their bones and take them home.

Ginny Brown-Waite said that her American Heroes Repatriation Act 2003 was a response to constituents’ concerns that their fathers and grandfathers were lying in “unpatriotic soil”. She said: “The French don’t seem to remember that if it wasn’t for America, they would be speaking German.”

Her melodramatic flourish was the most far-reaching effort yet to codify American anger at what politicians and the public see as a mixture of French ingratitude, arrogance and wilful obstruction of US foreign policy interests.

Deep irritation is also running rife in Whitehall, where Britain’s relations with France have been plunged into the diplomatic freezer. It emerged yesterday that ministerial contacts between London and Paris have all but ceased because of the dispute over Iraq.

Foreign Office officials disclosed that Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, had dozens of telephone conversations with counterparts around the world over the past week. He logged 21 calls to Colin Powell, his US counterpart. But he has not spoken to Dominique de Villepin, the French Foreign Minister, since the two men argued publicly across the floor of the United Nations Security Council last Friday.

In Downing Street, Mr Blair’s spokesman accused France of poisoning the diplomatic well: “I don’t think that anyone is under any illusion that if you inject into the diplomatic bloodstream a strategic, in-principle veto, then that’s going to poison the system and present very real difficulties.”

Cabinet ministers also vented thinly veiled frustration. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, said the threat of a French veto, come what may, represented an “unreasonable blockage”. Such a label is designed to pave the way for the US and Britain to argue that they have moral authority, should they win nine or ten votes for a second resolution, to override a French veto.

Mr Straw said that France had made a peaceful outcome more difficult to achieve. He said it was extraordinary that France was not prepared to give “proper consideration” to Britain’s proposals.

Animosity towards Paris is greater at street level in the US than in Britain. The sentiment has seen French fries renamed freedom fries and ad hoc boycotts of French wine and cheese across the country.

The denunciation of the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, first levelled by a character in the televised cartoon The Simpsons, has entered the public lexicon, emerging on more than 6,000 websites.

Politicians have resorted to caricature when seeking to undermine the French position. “The French remind me a little bit of an ageing actress of the 1940s who was still trying to dine out on her looks but doesn’t have the face for it,” John McCain, the Republican senator and former presidential hopeful, said.

Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board and Washington’s unofficial leading hawk, said France had betrayed America. “The French are given to the folie de grandeur always. With Chirac it has reached new heights,” he told The Times.

The sentiment is shared by many in the White House, although expressed in more diplomatic language. Ari Fleischer, President Bush’s spokesman, reflecting yesterday that France had promised to veto Britain’s latest proposals even before Iraq had objected to them, said: “This is not the way to disarm Saddam Hussein. This is not the way to have a peaceful outcome.”

The London-Paris row is likely to dominate the European Council meeting in Brussels on Thursday, when Mr Blair and President Chirac will meet.

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