Washington

Macron was referring to President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which is set to pour billions of dollars into environmentally friendly industries - with strong backing for US-based manufacturers.

This week’s visit — it will include Oval Office talks, a glitzy dinner, a news conference and more — comes at a critical moment for both leaders.

After talks with US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, speaking in Washington about the row with France over the AUKUS pact and aborted French submarines sale, called on France to 'prenez un grip about this and donnez-moi un break'.

The US president, meeting François Hollande in Washington, said the two countries 'stand united, in total solidarity, to deliver justice to these terrorists'.

The revelations that the United States has been tapping the phones of presidents and others senior figures in the French state have provoked a major controversy. Politicians from all parties queued up on Wednesday morning to denounce the spying, revealed in leaked documents obtained by WikiLeaks and published by Mediapart and Libération. President François Hollande, himself revealed to be the target of phone taps in 2012, called a meeting of the government’s defence committee and met a delegation of 20 Parliamentarians at lunchtime to discuss the spying crisis. The Elysée meanwhile issued a statement describing the reported spying as “unacceptable”. But the spying will have come as no great surprise to the authorities in Paris who have known about or suspected such espionage for years. But France has never previously made a major public fuss about the issue for the simple reason that it, too, is part of a vast network involving exchanges of information between intelligence services around the world. And because it, too, cheerfully snoops on its friends. Moreover, the revelations came on the eve of the final vote on the government’s new and highly-controversial snooping legislation. Lénaïg Bredoux and Mathieu Magnaudeix report.