Leading the sabre-rattling that added fire to today s fishing war in Jersey is Emmanuel Macron s hard-left maritime minister, a fisherman s daughter and Brexit hater who has made inflammatory threats to cut off the island s electricity.
Annick Girardin, a member of the Radical Party of the Left, is a straight-talking political street fighter who in a previous role led efforts to defend the French language over the growing global influence of English - an abiding obsession of the country s political class.
The 56-year-old, once dubbed the Pirate of Hope in a TV documentary praising her radical credentials, is MP for Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, an isolated, weather-beaten French overseas territory of just over 6,000 souls off the coast of Newfoundland, where she grew up and gave birth to her first child, a daughter, aged 15.