Nothing prohibits having, at the same time, humor and lucidity. Elisabeth Borne has both, as do the members of her cabinet. A few months ago, a work seminar was organized at Matignon in the style of “team-building”, during which the collaborators of the Prime Minister lent themselves to a little game, that of forbidden words. Each pole had to deliver a speech without resorting to certain terms or expressions that it harps on all day long: “National Assembly” or “vote” for the parliamentary pole; “ecological transition” or “green energy” for the ecology division… You have grasped the principle. This is the moment chosen by the owner of the place to pass a head in the village hall and greet her team. A chef is made to lead but also to set an example, so it’s Elisabeth Borne’s turn to take the plunge. His forbidden word? “Asshole”. No need for compromise, for once Borne found a consensus and an absolute majority in the audience.
The semantic flights of the Prime Minister have already passed on to posterity. The black rages that she pushes on the first floor, between the four walls of her padded office, are heard from the ground floor. The former prefect does not support imprecision, even less error, especially when she detects a touch of dilettantism there. It’s not the kind of house, whether at the time of the RATP, the Ministry of Labor or Matignon. Elisabeth Borne does not like hypocrisy, pretences, formalities, and too bad if her reaction is not proportionate.
“She is unable to say thank you”
“She is very harsh, often unfair, unable to say ‘thank you’,” breathes a minister who has practiced it for a long time and who, obviously, does not plead for the maintenance of the Prime Minister in her post. On the other hand, she knows how to make criticisms, embellish them with a few ‘It’s only me who works here?’ or ‘Do people really work in this shop?’ While around her, they are killing themselves with the task…” According to an internal source, “even those who toil until three in the morning” are entitled to this kind of pleasant reflections. A former member of the firm remembers having seen several of his colleagues in tears in the corridors of 57 rue de Varenne: “Collaborators in this state, it is not possible, you tell yourself that you have to get them out of there .”
In her first circle, she is described as “much more cash and spontaneous than mean”, but the temperament of Elisabeth Borne and the relationship, to say the least demanding, that she maintains with her collaborators are no longer a secret for anyone. They have been the object, for six years now, of low masses between the small hands of the ministerial cabinets which, for many, know each other, come out of the same formations, cross paths, recross and exchange on their respective experiences. It also happened to the Parisian to get carried away in public, as during a videoconference in the middle of the second wave of the Covid with the LREM deputies: believing her microphone deactivated and lacking a tad of patience, the Minister of Labor at the time “yelled” – according to three sources – at his team to fix the problem… which didn’t exist. A ministerial chief of staff admits it bluntly: “Tomorrow, even if you offer me double my salary to go work with her, I refuse. I am not ready to sacrifice my mental health.
However, a Matignon stamp on his curriculum vitae is difficult to refuse. Better still, Elisabeth Borne’s collaborators learn over time to deal with her cyclothymia, to retain only the impromptu burst of laughter that can follow a murderous thrust. It is enough, we are told, to digest that there is never anything personal or egocentric. Only one way to release the pressure. To demand excellence. And what does it matter to her if, unlike Edouard Philippe or even Jean Castex, the Prime Minister does not create a strong intimacy, a united collective around her. Only the result counts. “Deliver and deliver again”, as she says herself. “The Prime Minister’s way of doing things influences the rest of the team, it’s in her image, you have to like order. We arrive knowingly, it’s a form of contract that we pass,” said a former member of the team. His chief of staff, Aurélien Rousseau – a time on the departure but retained in Matignon so as not to add internal instability to the difficult political context -, tries as much as possible to play the firewall. “He says thank you for her, he instills a form of lightness”, we are told at Matignon. “He rounds off the angles a lot with her, makes the quilt and cashes in for the others”, blows a pillar of the executive.
Elisabeth Borne has always considered herself on a fixed-term contract, now she knows she is on borrowed time. Emmanuel Macron has instructed her to plan a new legislative agenda and, above all, to enlarge the majority. How ? With who ? At what deadline? Nobody knows. His mandate has everything of an impossible mission coupled with a new trial period. The atmosphere at Matignon would then have become all the more overwhelming. “Yes, I had the same echoes”, concede several members of the government. The somewhat suspended moment of the next speech by the President of the Republic generates a form of idleness and lack of certainty that weighs on the shoulders of the Borne team. But in the entourage of the Matignon tenant, we are assured that the last few months, and especially after the legislative elections, were much more trying times. The unknown is not big enough to paralyze the one who is ready, at any time, to play her role of fuse. A member of the government swears it: “Eisabeth Borne is the only human being that I know whom you can ask to go and immolate Place de la Concorde for France and who would do it.” But how many would follow her?