Chirac Barbs Fuel UK Food Feud

French President's Jokes On British Cuisine Reheat Longstanding Spat

(AP) 
Liberation, which said one of its reporters overheard the remarks, described them as joking and off-the-cuff. On Tuesday, it said Chirac's comments did not reflect the congenial mood of the leaders' discussions.

But Britons were not amused.

"Don't talk crepe, Jacques!" The Sun, Britain's biggest-selling newspaper, said in a commentary that savaged Chirac for dropping to "a new depth."

"His snide attacks on Britain expose him once and for all as a nasty, petty, racist creep," it said.

"A man full of bile is not fit to pronounce on food," food critic Egon Ronay was quoted as saying in a front-page story in The Guardian.

Blair, who was in Singapore pressing London's bid for the Olympics, did not comment directly. But when asked Monday whether the G-8 summit starting Wednesday in Scotland would be an anticlimax after the Olympic decision, he said:

"I won't say the G-8 summit would be an anticlimax to it because that would be undiplomatic and I know when I go there I will be in the presence of very diplomatic people," he said.

The Anglo-French rivalry dates at least to Shakespearean times, when the Bard once penned: "France is a dog-hole, and it no more merits the tread of man's foot." French novelist Stendahl delivered this biting 19th-century salvo: "The English are the most barbarous people in the world."