Skipper

My last post on Sarkozy featured that picture in which he seemed about to receive a gay kiss from Gordon; his romantic profile, of course, suggests he is anything but that way inclined. Which is not to say that his love life has been an unalloyed success. Just recently married for the third time to his glamorous former model cum folk singer, Carla Bruni, his celebrations seem to have been mitigated by more than slight residual yearning for the fair Cecilia, wife number two. According to Agnes Poirier, he texted his former wife just before his last(i.e. third- keep up!) marriage: 'If you come back, I'll call it all off'. Far from doing so his former spouse continued romancing Richard Attias, finally tying the knot with him yesterday.

This must have hurt a proud man: to be rejected for someone who used to 'organize events for Sarkozy's UMP party' when he is the glorious President of the Republic, must have hit his ego amid-ships. And if he surrounded-as he did- himself with an apparently doting family during his election campaign, was not that cynical spin? But it's so much worse than that. His wooing and then marriage to Carla, something which in theory the popular press should love, has proved unpopular to a fickle French public.

Swooning around the Middle East, with his fancy woman went against the grain for the French who wondered why all his famous dynamism was being invested in a vanity project when he had promised to solve his country's problems. The French have not been slow to pick up that in one of the four books on Cecilia shortly after she bade him goodbye, she says that Nicolas was 'never fit to be president'. All that manic activity focusing on himself, suggests his former missus might be close to the truth. Voters expressed a view of sorts in the recent local elections where Sarko was hammered by the socialists. The moral to be drawn? 'Celebrity' premiers might capture the interest of democratic voters for a while but without real evidence of substance, they soon rumble they've been conned. Nota bene anyone seeking to follow the Tony Blair route into Downing St- and that means you, David Cameron.