Emmanuel, Emmanuel, / His name is called Emmanuel. / God with us, revealed in us, / His name is called Emmanuel.

IT may be going a bit far to say the divine was with us in Britain last week, but there was nevertheless something transcendent about Emmanuel Macron’s visit. The French President sparkles and enchants as only a freshly-minted poster boy of global progressive politics can. Having turned 40 just before Christmas, he has the same allure as JFK, Tony Blair and Barack Obama before him: dashing, youthful looks, effortless charm, an appealing impishness, and, crucially, the earned confidence that comes with having done things your own way and pulled it off. It’s hard to think of a current UK politician who can boast even one of these qualities.

The trip kicked off with a tactical masterstroke, when it was announced France would loan the Bayeux Tapestry to Britain. This will be the first time the artwork has left French shores in 950 years, and is a significant gesture of goodwill from one of our main protagonists in the Brexit negotiations (we’ll brush, amused, over the fact the Tapestry displays the Norman Conquest of England). Mr Macron would “look with kindness on any British rethink about leaving the EU, he said, reducing Remainers to lovestruck mush.

But the best was kept till last. The President’s appearance on Sunday morning’s Andrew Marr programme on BBC1was a masterclass in effective 21st century communication. He was like a time-traveller who had popped back from the future to show our shrivelled, creaking governing class the route out of a culture that has grown stale, cynical and dangerously impotent.

It wasn’t just Mr Macron’s fluency while discussing complex ideas in a second language, impressive though that always is in this stubbornly monolingual country. He was also disarmingly thoughtful, frank and fair, not least about what we might expect from Brexit and what France and the wider EU might wear. The referendum result was driven by globalisation’s losers, he acknowledged: “My understanding is that the middle classes and working classes, and especially the oldest in your country, decided that the recent decades were not in their favour… and that the adjustments made by both the EU and globalisation - because for me it was a mix of both of them – were not in their favour.” He was non-partisan, admitting that in similar circumstances the French might have voted to leave too. “For sure”, he was outraged at Donald Trump’s description of some African states as “shithole” countries: ‘We disagree on several topics. I call him very regularly. I’m always extremely direct and frank. Sometimes I manage to convince him, and sometimes I fail.”

Mr Macron said his strategy for the presidency was “efficiency, authority, humanity”. His vision for the future of the EU was more democracy, more cohesion in areas such as the environment, digital, migration and collective security, but with different countries moving, where necessary, at different speeds. With Angela Merkel still struggling to put together a government in Germany, this brave, cool, pioneering occupant of the Elysee Palace is worth paying attention to. He is what real, modern leadership looks like – or should look like.

You could see his impact in the social media response among those whose day job it is to winkle an honest moment, or an unguarded contemplation from our domestic rulers. It’s not just the Maybot who looks clay-footed in comparison. “By God he answers a straight question. Our obfuscating politicians need to learn how to do that fast,” tweeted the Sun’s political editor. “Plenty for our politicians to build on. Engaged with the interviewer. Answering the questions,” said Sky’s Kay Burley. ‘Without going all fanboy, Macron is a class act. If only British politics could throw up someone similar,” added the chap from the FT.

There are many things British politicians could learn from Mr Macron’s approach – not least Labour’s moderates, whose spineless capitulation in the face of the hard-left takeover of their party is increasingly unsustainable. Westminster has much the same problem French politics did – old, calcified parties chasing populist sentiment and failing to make a compelling case for credible economic and social reform. Mr Macron decided the only answer was to break the mould, set up a new centrist party called En Marche!, and challenge the populists head on. He was elected to the presidency within six months. There are differences in the UK, of course, but these have become lazy excuses for inactivity.

Beyond this, though, Mr Macron seems to personify something more important than the future of the Labour Party. I’ve thought for some time that our model of public discourse is broken – that the toolkit used by our leaders to interact with the electorate is out of date. We are still stuck with pre-digital, late-20th century practice, where ministers expect to pull Lever A to produce Outcome B. Spin, soundbites, pitch-rolling and media management are deployed. The same tired, meaningless phrases are used: “let me be clear, “I don’t intend to give a running commentary”, “strong and stable”, “as I’ve said already”, and a million others. Tricky questions are blatantly avoided. This is deliberately meant to produce confusion and opacity, to buy the politician wriggle room, to avoid getting caught out.

But in an era of peer-to-peer communication, in which a lie or a bluff can be exposed on the internet within minutes, it is destroying trust and respect. Individual voters have never been more empowered, more connected to like minds and sympathetic causes, more able to express themselves directly. The fourth industrial revolution is seeing the fusion of technologies and a blurring of lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. It is too transformative a moment to be managed in the old, top-down way. The challenges we face, including the rise of robots and AI, ethical issues of identity and data sharing, all-powerful Silicon Valley monopolies, cannot successfully be met in the old way. The policy debates – be they around universal basic income, trust-busting, co-ordinated global tax agreements, whatever – are too big to be shoved through by an elite that believes it knows best. That bad habit is what brought us Brexit and President Trump.

So take a close look at Mr Macron while he still has the sheen of the new and the fragrance of hope. He is, I think, the first of a new breed. It might just save us.