Skipper

Politics throws up all kinds of ironies. Look at Segolene Royal shrugging aside her older male socialist rivals to win the nomination to contest the French presidency against(almost certainly), Nicolas Sarkozy. She greatly admires Tony Blair we understand, so just as the long serving, deeply unpopular Blair gives way over here- a short distance away a new political force arises claiming allegiance to that same burnt out Blairism.

Royal offers herself as an outsider yet she is quintessentially in the tradition of French 'enarques', educated at the (even for Brits used to Oxbridge) astonishingly elitist Ecole Nationale (ENA), where she sipped coffee with the aristocratic, poetry writing prime minister, Dominique Villepin and met her future husband, Francois Hollande, who just happens to have made his way to the leadership of the French Socialist Party. She is also a rather beautiful 53 year old mother of four who caused flurries of gossipy interest this summer when pictures of her well preserved bikini clad figure appeared in popular magazines.

Chirac's 12 year reign has seen flagrant corruption, economic stagnation and relatively high unemployment- yet the Socialists must still cringe when recalling that their challenger at the last election in 2002 failed, at the first burdle and let in Jean-Marie Le Pen to eventually lose the contest against the wily Chirac. Royal is not understood to sympathize with Tony's Bushite overseas adventurism but does share his belief that the economy has to be made more competitive by embracing market forces more wholeheartedly. As a result she has criticised the sacred 35 hour week and received not a few brickbats from the unions in consequence.

Despite her feminine charm, Segolene has a reputation for being tough, possibly the result of her rebellious relationship with her ultra -Catholic army colonel father. On supporter from the right is quoted in The Guardian as welcoming the fact that she is 'authoritarian' as 'This country needs change and we need someone strong to do it.' If our experience of Blair's similar tendencies are anything to go by, the French might very well choose this attractive new force in their politics but might also live to rue the day a decade hence.