THE SPECTATOR: The French President’s strop is more eloquent than any policy or speech, says Celia Walden. He is a pint-sized de Gaulle regularly made to look a fool by his wife
The truth, invariably, is in the detail. Theresa May’s leopard-print shoes, Jon Snow’s refusal to wear a poppy, Prince Andrew’s bedful of teddy bears, Nick Clegg’s arithmetic (he counted up the women all right but got the weekly pension wrong by two thirds, at 30 — wait for it — ‘quid’), and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s decision to take OK! to court ‘because they made it look as though all I did on my wedding day was eat’. World events, often opaque till years later, can betray little about the motivations of those involved, though one piece of trivia can do it for you.
‘Sarkozy fights voodoo doll’. Now there’s a headline. Read the piece once and you’ll be amused: the French President, it transpired last week, demanded the withdrawal from French bookshops of a voodoo doll in his image (complete with set of pins) being sold alongside a manual on how to put the evil eye on the President. Read the piece a second time and two things dawn on you. For Sarkozy to muster the time to dispatch a legal letter about some daft prank in the midst of a global meltdown is the first. But the wording of the letter, agreed by him and published in Le Monde, is significant enough to paralyse the attentive reader with horror. ‘Nicolas Sarkozy,’ writes lawyer Thierry Herzog to K&B publishers, ‘has instructed me to remind you that, whatever his status and fame, he has exclusive and absolute rights over his own image.’ Status and fame? Fame is for celebrities, surely? Were de Gaulle and Pompidou famous celebrities too, or has something changed? Is Sarko’s global fame now separate from his position as the French President? The egomaniacal explosion of vanity in that single word is enough to make one wonder whether Sarkozy is indeed in need of a large pin-prick to the head. >>> Celia Walden | October 29, 2008
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