Skipper

Curious how political cultures differ. Of course they reflect the overall underlying culture of a country and we've always had a problem with understanding our closest neighbours, the French. We know they have a more sophisticated attitude towards the whole business of sex and indeed, fidelity. It has long been taken for granted that people in high places will have lovers and so such revelations are scarcely news. The rate of transgression is probably the same over here, but tolerance is much less our side of the Channel. And our the tabloids sell millions of newspapers exploiting our outrage and our rather puerile fascination with what other people do under the sheets.

So the current outbreak of outrage in La Belle France is quite fascinating. It seems IMF boss and putative presidential candidate, Dominique Strauss-Kahn(or DSK), has been the means whereby France has become a little bit more like us. Is that a bad thing? In this case I think not. We have to appreciate that French people love gossip just as we do. The problem is that France has privacy laws which prevent such peccadilloes reaching the light of day. So everyone knows it's going on and are left to guess the details. The result is a thriving gossip mill in which
DSK has long featured. His propensity for pursuing women was well known and in 2009 the French satirist Stephane Guillon spoke of:

Strauss-Kahn's "obsession with females" on the equivalent of Radio 4's Today programme. Strauss-Kahn accused him on air of "nastiness" and Guillon – already under fire for lampooning several political figures – was sacked shortly afterwards.

The reason why France is so aghast at the probable destruction of DSK's chance of becoming a socialist president, is that in this instance it's not just extra-marital seduction involved, it's violence as well. His friends say such behaviour is alien to the man but novelist Tristane Banon claims he attacked her in 2002 and she had great difficulty in escaping. She was persuaded not to report the matter by her mother at the time but is now again considering whether to do so.

Its all so reminiscent of Tom Wolfe's novel saga, The Bonfire of the Vanities, when Financial wizard and 'Master of the Universe', Sherman McCoy hits a black boy with his car in the Bronx and ends up in court. Humiliated,he is brought as low as other accused criminals and suffers time in jail. So far so 'Bonfire' for Stauss -Kahn, much to the horror of the viscerally anti-US French left. Another thought flits across the mind though. Think Rainbow Warrior and the French secret service, think Jacques Chirac and his portfolio of dirty tricks and could this be a put up job by Sarkozy- languishing with rubbish ratings- to take out his major opponent for next year's presidential elections? Just a thought.

Stop Press! Take a look at this just to give the conspiracy theory legs.