Mr Normal has become the Pitiful President

One year in, François Hollande has alienated most voters, antagonised Angela Merkel, driven droves of French into exile and presided over a worsening economy. Anne-Elisabeth Moutet reports.

 

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet debates the Cahuzac scandal rocking the Hollande presidency.

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

7:31PM BST 02 May 2013

111 Comments

With hindsight, it seems as if François Hollande’s troubles started the day he was inaugurated, on May 15 2012. First he was drenched by a surprise storm as his open Citroën drove up the Champs-Elysées. Then, the very same day, his Falcon plane was hit by lightning on the way to Berlin, where he was scheduled to meet Angela Merkel – making it possibly the first and last time the German Chancellor has felt unreserved sympathy for him.

The new president had to turn back before travelling to Berlin in another aircraft. When he got there – in more pouring rain – he missed a turn on the airfield red carpet while reviewing German troops, and had to be steered back in the right direction by Mrs Merkel’s firm grip on his elbow, a moment that presciently symbolised their future relationship.

And everything went downhill from there.

One year later, the man who had billed himself as the “normal president” during his victorious campaign against Nicolas Sarkozy is breaking records for unpopularity. With 75 per cent against him, Hollande is scoring the lowest approval ratings of any president of the Fifth Republic since the country started conducting polls. Unemployment has risen by 11.5 per cent since his election, reaching an all-time high of 3.2 million. An estimated 150,000 young people have left the country in search of better prospects abroad: the only jobs created in France have been in the public sector, usually in fields such as teaching that are solidly controlled by Socialist voters.

Despite a widely touted “austerity” drive, public spending stands at 57 per cent of GDP – the figure in Britain is 45 per cent – and the country’s public debt is about to reach 94 per cent of GDP. The largest street demonstrations since 1984 – when the country also had a Socialist president, François Mitterrand – have brought more than a million people on to the streets of Paris on two occasions (and more are planned), to protest against justice minister Christiane Taubira’s new law on gay marriage and adoption: given that France is a fairly tolerant society, these were effectively a street referendum against Hollande.

France’s very visible spat with Germany is a good example of how Hollande manages to make a bad situation worse. It is hardly new for French and German governments to disagree on economic issues; nor is it unusual that its leaders belong to different political parties. Yet, mindful of the European leverage afforded by the French-German axis, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a conservative, was excellent friends with the Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt, while the Socialist Mitterrand spoke in almost Gaullian terms of his German counterpart, the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl. Even Jacques Chirac never clashed with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the way he did (as PM) with Margaret Thatcher.

Hollande, however, still seems to manage France the way he managed rival “currents” during his long tenure as Socialist Party leader, trying to play one against the other while trying to keep everyone happy by granting them some sort of concession. This was in evidence at last year’s European summit, where instead of sitting down with Mrs Merkel to hammer out a viable compromise, he tried to rustle up an alliance with Spain and Italy behind her back, thinking this would be enough to counter the German position.

“This may work in Corrèze [Hollande’s constituency in central France]; it doesn’t in the real world,” a French diplomat commented at the time. “At the end of the day, the Germans were annoyed, the French line was all but absent from the final communiqué – and Mrs Merkel and David Cameron found themselves in closer alliance than they’d ever been.”

Recently, a trio of ministers including the flamboyant Arnaud Montebourg, minister for industrial recovery, started making increasingly belligerent statements about “German-imposed austerity”, accusing Mrs Merkel of “egotistical intransigence” and calling for “a democratic confrontation with Germany”, without being taken to task by the president.
It didn’t take long for Mrs Merkel’s entourage, who are much savvier in the ways of French politics than the French are about Berlin affairs, to counterleak a memo – plausibly produced by the Chancellor’s coalition partners, the Free Democrats – on France being “Europe’s biggest problem child”, with a stalled economy and a “meandering” reform programme. Mrs Merkel then gave a perfunctory denial that she thought anything of the kind.

The truth is that she is incensed with Hollande, not least because of her growing conviction that the French president and his spin doctors allowed the German-bashing because they felt that it would displace domestic dissatisfaction with Hollande on to Germany.

Even the notoriously complacent French press is now giving the president a hard time. “Is 'GrandPa’ [one of Hollande’s mildest nicknames] really up to it?” asked the news magazine L’Express on a recent cover. Le Point called him “Monsieur Faible” – Mr Weak – after Hollande confessed that he hadn’t believed the economic crisis would “last so long”.

No relief was to be expected after the announcement yesterday that Arnaud Montebourg had scuppered a deal by which Yahoo had agreed to acquire 75 per cent of Dailymotion, a successful French internet video site, valuing it at $300 million. “Yahoo wants to devour Dailymotion, but we told them no and that it had to be a 50:50 split,” the avowedly anti-American Montebourg boasted to Europe 1 radio. Whereupon Yahoo called the whole thing off.

Similar grandstanding by Montebourg had already driven the Indian tycoon Lakshmi Mittal from the Florange steelworks in Lorraine, and the American company Titan International from a floundering Goodyear tyre plant in northern France.

“The country is drowning in an ocean of discouragement,” said Christophe Barbier, the influential editor of L’Express. “It’s not just the tax-avoiding rich, artists like Gérard Depardieu, businessmen – everyone is now tempted to leave for a better life elsewhere. Young people feel they will never get a break, a job, a sign of trust. Entrepreneurs have to fend off red tape, rising costs and levies.”

In April, to add to this toxic climate, came the Cahuzac scandal: France’s budget minister, the man in charge of fighting tax fraud, was revealed to have a secret bank account in Switzerland – and in all likelihood another in Singapore – and to have lied to the president and parliament about it.

In the past week, polls have given Marine Le Pen, the far-Right National Front leader, record numbers in a hypothetical presidential election – 23 per cent, well above Hollande at 19 per cent, while Sarkozy scored 34 per cent. Were Sarkozy to stand, he would beat Le Pen easily in the second round but the talk in France has been of the dangers of Fascism, beginning with the very real distrust of all politicians and of the ruling class.

It says a lot about Hollande’s tin ear that he chose that very moment to compel ministers to disclose their personal assets, arguing for the virtues of “transparency” against corruption. This may work in the United States, where personal success is admired: but in France, a country where unregenerated Marxist thought still largely holds sway, overlaying a centuries-old Catholic mistrust of money, it prompted Claude Bartolone, the Socialist Speaker of the National Assembly, who is fighting suggestions of a similar obligation for MPs, to talk of “voyeurism and envy”.

Embattled in the Élysée Palace, where at times it seems his only remaining supporter is his partner Valérie Trierweiler – a woman so unpopular that Hollande has to fend off unpleasant remarks about her during his rare walkabouts – the president is now mulling a cabinet reshuffle as a way of signalling to the French that he has taken their displeasure on board.

But whom to choose to replace his weak prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, a former German language teacher? The 2007 Socialist presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, is unacceptable to Mme Trierweiler. The former Socialist leader Martine Aubry, Jacques Delors’s daughter and the artisan of the rigid 35-hour working week, may be unacceptable to Mrs Merkel. François Mitterrand’s former PM, Laurent Fabius, now the foreign minister, is hampered by having just been revealed to be the richest man in the Cabinet.
Hollande’s instinct is probably to try to trundle along with the same tired team. His latest attempt to show that the presidency is doing its part to relieve the public debt has been to announce that he will sell part of its cellar of fine wines, lovingly accrued since the Vincent Auriol presidency in 1947.

On May 30 and 31, 2,200-euro bottles of 1990 Pétrus and Château d’Yquem will be auctioned off, “to be replaced by more modest vintages”, according to the president. So speaks a self-proclaimed modest man, who may be feeling that he has a lot to be modest about.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

François Hollande and the bedroom farce paralysing France

As a new book scrutinises French president François Hollande’s unique personal life, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet reveals how his inability to stand up to his love interests is now threatening his administration

French president Francois Hollande and his former partner Segolene Royal Photo: REX FEATURES

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

7:00AM BST 14 Oct 2012

It started off like a French farce. Will it end up like a Greek tragedy? France’s “First Girlfriend”, Valérie Trierweiler, may well cause the political downfall of the man she fought so bitterly to catch – and still can’t get a marriage commitment from.

Five months after he was elected, François Hollande’s popularity figures are the lowest of any French president since Charles de Gaulle signed the 1962 treaty acknowledging the independence of Algeria after a bloody anti-colonialist war.

The general consensus is that Ms Trierweiler is one of the chief reasons why the Fifth Republic’s seventh president is seen as henpecked, inefficient and vacillating – in short, not in charge.

“The five women who make his life hell” was last week’s headline on news magazine L’Express. First on the list were the president’s partners, past and present: Ségolène Royal, the former presidential contender and mother of Hollande’s four children; and Valérie, the Paris-Match journalist who won Hollande from Royal.

The other three were former Socialist leader Martine Aubry, Green leader Cécile Duflot, and Angela Merkel: they would never have been qualified by gender if Hollande’s chaotic private life wasn’t the first subject of gossip and conjecture these days.

In this toxic environment came the revelations in La Frondeuse (“The Troublemaker”), a new biography published last Thursday by journalists Alix Bouilhaguet and Christophe Jakubyszyn, that while she was busy prying Hollande away from the home he’d been making with Royal for more than two decades, the (still-married) Trierweiler was three-timing – or should it be four-timing? – him with Patrick Devedjian, a former Sarkozyste cabinet minister.

The book also recounts how, around the same time, a spitting-mad Ségolène accused Hollande of cheating on her with Anne Hidalgo, an elegant brunette Socialist politician, now Deputy Mayor of Paris, and expected to run for City Hall herself in 2015.

If, by this stage, you’re getting confused, let’s take a deep breath and plough on. Hollande and Royal meet while students at ENA, the top government school that in France guarantees you a network and a career Oxbridge graduates can only dream of. They became one of France’s Left-wing power couples, seemingly unmarried because it was so un-bourgeois, so much, well, cooler. Assigned to cover them for Paris-Match was a young and elegant political reporter, Trierweiler, herself twice-married. When, in 1992, Royal, then minister for social affairs, invited the press to the maternity clinic where she’d just had her daughter Flora, it was Trierweiler who covered the birth, in breathless prose. The fact that a woman minister would admit the public to such a personal event was treated as a feminist breakthrough.

Hollande and Trierweiler didn’t get together then; but in La Frondeuse it is alleged that they had linked up by 1997, far earlier than the official version which dates it back to 2005. Meanwhile, Trierweiler was making a name for herself in the old style of French women political journalists: getting inside information with, let’s say, allure and poise.

If this sounds distasteful, that is because it is. And for this (happily receding) journalistic tradition, we have to thank one of France’s great magazine editors, the late Françoise Giroud – later Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s minister for women’s rights – who, when she headed L’Express in the Sixties and Seventies, sent out a large number of personable female reporters to “charm” the largely male political class and get good stories.

Giroud, herself a hugely gifted writer, but also the mistress of the flamboyant politician and L’Express proprietor Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, would teach her young reporters how to dress and give them social deportment tips.

All of her alumni were talented in their own right; most of them later became top executives in television news or newspapers. Still, acceptance and access was given to them because of their youth and looks rather than their competence – and most of them had quite public affairs with (married) top politicians.

Starting out in the 1980s, I still remember how every politician I was sent to interview seemed to assume that I would be available if they cared enough to ask: after a couple of weeks, I asked my then employers to transfer me to the foreign desk. Nothing untoward had happened, but I hated every single minute it. Getting shot at in southern Lebanon was blissfully uncomplicated by comparison.

The zeitgeist moves on, even in France: while affairs still go on, the relationship between politicians and the press has been “normal” for a while. The Giroud world is as alien to politicians under the age of 40 as to the reporters covering them.

But Valérie Trierweiler is, in many ways, an old-fashioned girl. “She is insecure, jittery, unable to make a choice,” wrote the authors of La Frondeuse. “She wants it all, a career and the job of First Lady – the press pass and the office at the Élysée Palace.”

When her editors at Paris-Match, unwilling to antagonise the Élysée but aware of the conflict of interest, finally summoned up the courage to ask her to cover culture rather than politics, Trierweiler’s very first article last June was a review of an Eleanor Roosevelt biography.

“Well, well, well, a First Lady who’s also a journalist! Obviously in America these things do not cause a scandal,” the piece began, one of many examples of her tin ear. Another was the highly publicised tweet in support of Ségolène Royal’s opponent in June’s general election.

Trierweiler’s friends and critics both explain her many public mistakes, as well as her well-known sudden rages – much feared by Hollande – by her seemingly bottomless insecurity. “She dreams of getting him to marry her, but he’s not the marrying kind,” one of them told the book’s authors, who allege that if Trierweiler finally chose Hollande over Devedjian, at the time a politician with a brighter future, it is because Devedjian would not leave Corinne, his wife of 30 years.

The French are notoriously more lenient on homewreckers than les Anglais – the feeling here is that It’s All More Complicated and Not Just The Woman’s Fault. This, however, plays against Hollande.

Trierweiler is uniquely disliked (less than 29 per cent of the public have a good opinion of her), but the President is seen as commitment-shy. Increasingly, there’s a feeling that he applies the same aimlessness to his management of public affairs.

Political observers recall how under his 15-year stewardship of the Socialist Party, his unique compromise style led the party’s “currents” – a fancy name for the infighting factions more divided by personal ambitions than by ideology – to complete gridlock. Nothing ever got done. When Martine Aubry took over as leader from Hollande in 2008, she said the place was such a mess in every possible way that she even had to unblock the loos herself.

“He’s unable to take a decision,” says a friend of Aubry’s. “It doesn’t do that much harm running an opposition party. But when he negotiates with Angela Merkel, it’s a real problem.”

Just as Hollande tries to hide the occasional contact he still has with the mother of his children – prompting outbursts from Trierweiler when she finds out – he chose recently to gang up with the Italians and the Spanish rather than ask Merkel directly for the concessions he sought in the latest Eurozone negotiations, to the German Chancellor’s outrage.

And just as Merkel is now surprised to find herself missing Nicolas Sarkozy’s more direct style, the French may begin to wonder whether having a “hyper-president” in the Élysée wasn’t a better idea in difficult times than a henpecked figure hiding from the women in his life.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

France's battle royal between Ségolène Royal and Valérie Trierweiler has the nation gripped

The warring women on the frontline are giving politics a sharply feminine edge.

Valérie Trierweiler: giving France a delightful taste of personal strife Photo: AFP/Getty Images

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

9:28PM BST 13 Jun 2012

89 Comments

The French, like most of us, love a catfight. When First Girlfriend Valérie Trierweiler tweeted her support for the opponent of Ségolène Royal, the rival she supplanted in the affections of President François Hollande, in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, the entire nation sank with delight into the bliss of watching the political become personal.

Barely a month ago, the day after her partner was elected President of the French Republic, Trierweiler confidently told Agence France Presse how much better suited to the job she was than her predecessor, Carla Bruni, Nicolas Sarkozy’s third wife. “Carla Bruni comes from a world entirely alien to politics: fashion, showbusiness. She doesn’t know its codes.” She, on the other hand, Trierweiler explained somewhat smugly, had been a political journalist for 20 years. “I know politics, I know the media.”

The woman many of the French are calling “Rottweiler” then illustrated the shortest way to link the words “pride”, “goeth”, “before” and “fall”. Nicolas Sarkozy had been kicked out of office chiefly for having paraded his private life with ostentation. Demurring that she would play “no political part whatsoever”, Trierweiler made it difficult to forget her existence for one minute. Whether she was bemoaning that she didn’t like the title “First Lady” and inviting the public to think up a new one, or insisting that she could remain a working Paris Match reporter “in all independence” while maintaining a staff and office at the Élysée Palace, she was hardly ever out of the news.

Scenting a rich vein, the political puppet show Les Guignols de l’info hastily recycled the puppet they’d used for Jacques Chirac’s spin-doctor daughter Claude, slapping on a new wig and redoing its make-up to rush their Valérie on air. They now portray Hollande as a bumbling, henpecked husband. Deferring to She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, the President is depicted fleeing to the comforting arms of a softer, sweeter, more understanding female – Angela Merkel.

But in real life, the woman Trierweiler has been obsessing about for nearly a decade is Ségolène Royal, Hollande’s former partner of 23 years and the mother of his four children. Trierweiler admits to having started her affair with Hollande in 2005. He was then Socialist Party leader; she had been covering the Left as a Paris Match political correspondent for years. But they’d met years before: it was a young Trierweiler who reported from Royal’s maternity ward after she gave birth to her and Hollande’s last child, Flora, in 1992. She’d remained friendly with Flora’s father ever since.

Royal, who had gradually become aware of her partner’s betrayal, kept silent until the night of her 2007 defeat against Nicolas Sarkozy. Then, minutes after the result, she announced that the doors of her house were “now closed to Hollande” – who, while still officially living with her, had in fact moved into Trierweiler’s flat. It transpired that Trierweiler had egged him on to sabotage Royal’s presidential bid during the campaign.

Having lost her bid for a second presidential try in last year’s Socialist primaries, Royal immediately gave her support to her children’s father. Meanwhile, Trierweiler went to absurd lengths to sideline her. In rallies, Royal found herself seated away from other party bigwigs, and excluded from pictures. The children, who also were involved with the campaign, tried to intervene with Hollande, but to no effect; instead he often remonstrated with his advisers that they should “support Valérie: she’s so insecure”. Royal was excluded from Hollande’s Élysée swearing-in, but he did give her his official support in her bid for the La Rochelle seat, in the region where she has been council president for eight years.

This infuriated Trierweiler and led to this week’s tweeting extremes, igniting the kind of nationwide ruckus which is still in full swing. She has dug her heels in, refusing to recant her tweet. Meanwhile, several former Royal adversaries, all women, including Socialist leader Martine Aubry and Green leader Cécile Duflot, have very loudly sided with her. “I hope this tweet gets [Royal] elected,” Aubry said yesterday.

Feminine solidarity is relatively new in France, in politics and elsewhere: it was really only seen last year, at the height of the Strauss-Kahn affair, when women politicians from Marine le Pen to a Trotskyite, including two then Cabinet ministers, denounced casual sexism and double standards. Earlier, Rachida Dati, Sarkozy’s glamorous justice minister, found relatively little support when she chose to become a single mother in office, then got sidelined partly because she’d been a friend of her boss’s second wife. But all signs are that Trierweiler’s latest outburst may have triggered unintended consequences. “You started missing Sarkozy, now you will miss Carla,” Nadine Morano, a former Sarkozy minister, tweeted yesterday.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

Valérie Trierweiler: France's feisty new first lady seizes the limelight from her rivals

France's new first lady is already ruffling feathers as she seizes the limelight from her rivals, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris. 

 

Trierweiler first met Hollande in 1988, when she was a bright, 23-year-old reporter and he was a 34-year-old MP Photo: AP

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

7:30AM BST 13 May 2012

François Hollande moves into the Élysée Palace this Thursday, but he is already facing a very domestic crisis. Ever since he was declared France’s 24th president a week ago, his lover, the elegant Paris Match journalist, Valérie Trierweiler, 47, has been making headlines of her own.
 

For instance, Le Canard enchaîné, France’s answer to Private Eye, published an angry text message from Trierweiler to Mariana Grépinet, a colleague.

Grépinet had mentioned, in what would otherwise be described as a puff piece about France’s new presidential couple, one of Hollande’s children with Ségolène Royal, the 2007 Socialist presidential candidate and Hollande’s former lover of 23 years.

The article did not explicitly state that the couple were no longer together. "What game are you playing?" the text threateningly ended
 

Then there was Olivier Bourg, the radio presenter and stand-up comic, who tried to pull his trademark trick of calling Trierweiler’s mobile to wheedle careless statements from her, as he had from countless celebrities before. Trierweiler sussed him out fast enough, and retorted on air, in a pinched voice, "I won’t forget this", before hanging up.

In case anyone hadn’t got the message, on Wednesday, Trierweiler, who a UMP party ally of Nicolas Sarkozy once referred to as "Rottweiler", blocked Julien Dray, an MP and one of Hollande’s key campaign managers, from setting foot inside the victory party.

His offence appears to have been to invite Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund chief, to his birthday event days earlier. Strauss-Kahn, Hollande’s rival for the Socialist presidential nomination until a New York hotel maid complained of sexual assault, mingled with Hollande’s closest advisers. Even worse, the party was held in a fashionable new restaurant in a refurbished sex shop in Paris’s red light district.

Any doubt over the political jeopardy this entailed was dispelled when Sarkozy brought up Strauss-Kahn’s attendance, to lambast Hollande during their heated television debate three days before the final vote.

But party insiders suggest Trierweiler has "had it in for Dray" for far longer. Since 2007, in fact, when he was Royal’s election campaign manager. "Valérie", they will tell you feelingly, "can certainly bear a grudge".

This had been known in political circles for a long time, but is emerging only now that media attention has turned to France’s new première dame.

When Trierweiler, a twice-divorced history graduate who has spent almost her entire career at the celebrity-obsessed Paris Match, told an interviewer she would not be a "potiche" (a decorative nonentity), it was widely interpreted as a swipe at her predecessor, Carla Bruni.

Asked how she would cope with life in the front line of French politics, she said, patronisingly, that she was far better equipped than Bruni for the role: "She came from a world totally alien to that of politics. She did not necessarily know the political codes."

This is not only dismissive but ill-judged. During her four years in the Élysée, Bruni did not put a foot wrong. She is cultured and has excellent manners. She has a sense of humour and even made friends with the journalists who lampooned her. When Le Canard enchaîné ran a spoof column, Carla B’s Diary, Bruni laughed about it among her friends and invited its author to the Élysée.

Trierweiler, by contrast, has already alienated people she ought to have been assiduously cultivating; and much of that stems from her involvement with Hollande and antagonism with Royal.

Trierweiler first met Hollande in 1988, when she was a bright, 23-year-old reporter and he was a 34-year-old MP, a former Mitterrand aide and part of the new intake.

In 1992, Trierweiler covered the birth of Flora, Royal and Hollande’s fourth child. Meanwhile, Trierweiler had three boys during her marriage to Paris Match sub-editor, Denis Trierweiler.

In 2005 she began her affair with Hollande, who was still living with Royal and their four children. When news of it reached Alain Genestar, the then editor of Paris Match, she refused to see any potential conflict of interest between her private life and her job covering the Socialist Party for the magazine. Eventually, Genestar told two journalists, he had to shift her to the cultural section of the magazine. Trierweiler, who loves the political scene, was said to be resentful.

By 2007 Royal had beaten Hollande to become the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate. Despite his affair with Trierweiler, he campaigned alongside Royal as her lover, but appeared resentful and unconvincing.

Some wondered whether Trierweiler encouraged Hollande’s seemingly passive-aggressive stance towards Royal’s candidacy. Royal would send Hollande her speeches in advance; he’d then call her minutes before she stepped on to the dais to say that the speech was all wrong. The night Royal lost to Sarkozy, the fiction that she and Hollande were together was dropped with a very public press release from Royal.

But Trierweiler’s apparent hostility towards Royal seemed to persist. One insider recalls the time that Hollande answered a question about Royal during a television interview in 2010, then received an angry text message from Trierweiler. As Franz-Olivier Giesbert, his interviewer, tried to reassure him that he had not strayed from politics in his reply, he said: "You don’t realise, I’m going to get hell at home."

In January, Hollande’s first major campaign speech as Socialist presidential candidate was introduced by a video tracing the past 40 years of the party. Jarringly, to many of the rank and file, it ended in 2002, the year that Lionel Jospin came third in the first round of the election, leaving the party without a candidate in the final run-off. Royal’s 2007 presidential bid was omitted, a decision that was chalked up to Trierweiler’s influence

Despite loyally supporting Hollande as he fought for the party’s nomination, Royal was relegated at the campaign launch to a distant seat, while Trierweiler stood close to her lover. Aides said Royal collapsed in tears afterwards.

Trierweiler had her own office at Hollande HQ during the campaign, but her feminist-sounding line is that she remains a journalist and, in any case, needs the work to support her own family. Friends say she’s writing the text for an instant coffee-table photo book on the campaign, to be published next month.

Yet Royal is not about to slink quietly from the Socialist scene. She is aiming for a role as Speaker of the National Assembly, keeping her at the forefront of French political life.

Trierweiler’s career is now under the spotlight. When the political talk show she hosted on a cable television station was cancelled, Paris Match offered to pay her to, in effect, stay at home. She is resisting that plan angrily. In an interview with tomorrow’s Elle magazine, she says she would rather interview "foreign personalities" to keep "a proper distance" without "impeding François Hollande’s work".

But she will never be far away. On election night at the Place de la Bastille, it was she who ordered Hollande, whose style this definitely is not, to kiss her on the mouth, thus securing the perfect picture.

Trierweiler will make her international debut at next weekend’s G8 summit at Camp David in the US. At the time of writing, there is wild speculation that the president and his love might hastily get married this week. And live happily ever after, of course.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

Dominique Strauss-Kahn is left with only 'French maids’ for company

Once Dominique Strauss-Kahn was a shoo-in for the next president of France - but those heady days are long gone.

Dominique Strauss-Khan's wife has decamped to Morocco, and demonstrators and the media follow his every move Photo: GETTY

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:30PM GMT 30 Nov 2011

114 Comments
 

It’s no fun being Dominique Strauss-Kahn these days. His long-suffering wife, the millionaire art heiress Anne Sinclair, has decamped for the family ryad in Marrakesh, leaving him to face the daily revelations about prostitutes being flown to him in Washington. His Place des Vosges neighbours are up in arms as the quiet of their beautiful, 400-year-old Parisian square is disturbed by demonstrations against the “sexism” of the former head of the IMF. (A recent one involved a gaggle of Ukrainian feminists, bussed in from Kiev, wearing bikinis, “French maid” outfits, stilettos, stockings and garter belts.

His every move is followed by paparazzi. And even though the case that put his adventurous sex life in the open was dismissed by the New York courts, the hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo is suing him in a civil court, where she expects to win massive damages. Once he was a shoo-in for the next president of France; those heady days are long gone.

Now Edward Epstein has written an “investigative” piece for the New York Review of Books, which attempts to prove that the alleged rape was a set-up masterminded by Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, the UMP. Using footage from the hotel’s security cameras and telephone records, presumably fed by DSK’s defenders, Epstein constructs a ripping story of entrapment.

He makes much of a supposed “victory dance” caught on CCTV by two low-level hotel employees after the police were brought in to hear Diallo on the day of the alleged assault, using it to suggest that Accor, the French chain managing the hotel, were involved in bringing Sarkozy’s most dangerous rival down. (The employees, however, have said they were discussing sport.)

Alas for DSK, even his closest friends and political supporters aren’t buying Epstein’s thesis. The latest one to dismiss it is Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, a Socialist MP who was widely tipped be part of a 2012 DSK cabinet, and who once carried the can for DSK in a party financing scandal. But Paris is almost entirely unanimous on one point: that Epstein’s very readable piece is predicated on an assumption of competence by the UMP dirty tricks department that’s nothing short of fantastic. “That lot couldn’t conspire their way out of a paper bag” is the consensus.

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It’s not just the Right that’s disorganised. The team running the campaign for François Hollande, the Socialist presidential challenger, has had to assign a minder to his gaffe-prone partner, the former Paris Match reporter Valérie Trierweiler (nicknamed Valérie Rottweiler). Trierweiler, who covered Hollande and his then partner of 20 years, Ségolène Royal, for Match (even reporting from the post-delivery room after the birth of the last of the couple’s four children in 1992) says coyly that her “relationship with François changed in 2005”, a date that some dispute. She took to giving embarrassing interviews in which she said that Ségolène should “learn to step back”. Rottweiler is now being “advised” by one Nathalie Mercier, a PR hack from the very agency which conducted the campaign to clear DSK’s name with such alacrity. Oh for the days of Madame de Gaulle, who never said a word.

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Is sex compulsory in France? A man who “mostly’’ stopped having sexual relations with his wife of 21 years has just been fined 10,000 euros damages by an Aix-en-Provence court on appeal, confirming a similar 2009 ruling. Two sets of judges concurred in finding that the man’s wedding vows had not been followed, even though he “occasionally” still performed, and that his wife’s rights and expectations were not respected. The couple are now divorced in a ruling setting the fault 100 per cent on him. Can damages for unsatisfying performances be far behind?

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012