Tony Blair is speaking remarkably fluent French these days, as listeners to France’s main radio station discovered yesterday.

The former Prime Minister, who once boasted solid schoolboy French, has suddenly mastered a new political vocabulary and held his own against the country’s toughest interviewer.

For 20 minutes facing Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, a veteran inquisitor and boss of the Europe-1 station, Mr Blair showed off his French which has become suspiciously slick of late.

Mr Blair’s interview on breakfast radio was part of a charm offensive that has made him a fixture of the Paris landscape. No sitting or former British Prime Minister for decades has submitted to a French-language grilling of this kind.

Blair casts himself as EU president candidate

Speaking on French TV, Tony Blair sang the praises of the EU and sketched his agenda for its future, all in fluent French

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In Paris the revelation, coupled with his praise for the European Union and his agenda for its future, dispelled any doubts that Mr Blair is angling to be President of Europe. Fluency in French will be essential for the future EU President, which comes into being next year.

President Sarkozy has been promoting “mon ami Tony” as the ideal candidate when the union appoints a permanent president for its council under its new treaty next January. The former Prime Minister, who is busy as Middle East envoy and high-paid consultant, would not comment about the post. But he is clearly drawn by the idea and casting himself as a candidate.

In London yesterday, Mr Blair told The Times that he has been spending time in France because so much is happening under Mr Sarkozy. He had always kept his French, he said. “You do pick up quite a lot in meetings. It has been very useful for me. There are lots of leaders whom I speak to in French like [Jose MarÍa] Aznar or [Silvio] Berlusconi. It is so much easier to have a relationship when you are not going through an interpreter.”

A Blair Presidency is opposed in France by the Socialist party and by senior figures in Mr Sarkozy’s own camp, including Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French President who drafted the defunct EU Constitution in 2005. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, is said to be unhappy with the idea but Mr Sarkozy is convinced that he can persuade her, his staff says.

Mr Elkabbach did not press him directly about the job but he cited a remark in which Mr Sarkozy said that Mr Blair was qualified because he is “le plus grand européen des anglais”.

Mr Blair replied: “I am completely in favour of Europe because I think that it is the future for Great Britain . . . and all the countries of Europe.”

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