Certain Ideas of Europe, the Economist blog, under the heading Speaking French: a British terror, has links to clips of Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth II speaking French, and Nicolas Sarkozy speaking English.
Your reporter once had a boss in Brussels, many years ago, who came from a generation of Englishmen who learned technically perfect French but believed that it was somehow actorish and unmanly to speak it with anything except a full-strength British accent.
My mother did French at school and at university, in the early 1920s, and she used to say, ‘We didn’t do the accent in those days’.
Margaret Marks points at a post in the Economist blog making fun of Brittons speaking French with an accent:
Your reporter once had a boss in Brussels, many years ago, who came from a generation of Englishmen who learned technically perfect French but …