Secrets and Lies
Hugo Rifkind, writing in the Times, hits the spot with his assessment of the cultural differences either side of the English Channel - on the one hand the French try their best to look the other way over the ridiculous antics of President Francois Hollande, but on the other the authorities take tough action by preventing the controversial comedian Dieudonne from performing his anti-Semitic show live on stage.
Arguably the President's extra-curricular activities are harming no one but himself, if you leave the First Lady (Valerie Trierwelier) out of the picture that is, although to my mind it says a lot about the man's poor judgment that he is prepared to run such high risks with his Presidency instead of behaving in a grown up and honest way with his partner, even if that means bringing their relationship to a civilised end.
Dominic Strauss-Khan, the disgraced former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is another French politician who had a strange attitude towards women and sexual politics and he was a Socialist as well, perhaps the favourite to secure his party's nomination to contest the Presidency until he was laid low by allegations of sexual assault on a chamber maid (Nafissatou Diallo) in New York.
So, if you ask me these guys have got to grow up and stop making pathetic excuses for their Tom-catting behaviour - in the 21st century politicians, like everyone else, are entitled to their private lives, but not if this is completely at odds with their public persona.
Funnily enough, there's no sign that the stresses of the job makes senior politicians behaving in this strange way - Angela Merkel doesn't, nor does David Cameron, or Alex Salmond, or Barack Obama, or Tony Blair for that matter.
Cosy cover-ups end in uncomfortable places
B Hugo Rifkind
France’s elite believes Hollande’s affair should stay private. No wonder its people are attracted to extremism
The absurdities and flaws of other countries are always easier to spot than those of your own. Viewed from anywhere right now, however, those of France look pretty glaring.
No, it’s not the scooter. I mean, come on. Perhaps you missed our own Deputy Prime Minister on the radio this weekend, cautiously suggesting that he could probably handle the Shadow Chancellor in a fight because he recently started kickboxing lessons. My point being that when it comes to leaders who want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger but actually look like Gareth from The Office, well, we Brits are in no position to snigger.
More uniquely and Frenchly problematic, however, is the apparent turmoil over whether they all even ought to know about François Hollande’s adventures with scooting and an actress and only owning one pair of shoes and the rest of it, or whether they ought to tug their forelocks, avert their eyes, and get back to all (one assumes) having affairs of their own.
Meanwhile, and far less fun, the French are trying to figure out what to do about Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, a comedian who once ran for office as “the anti-Zionist party” and keeps saying nasty things about the Holocaust. Personally I’m surprised about this, as you probably are, because I too was under the impression that French comedians restricted their repertoires to doing those mimes where they pretend to be trapped inside a box or travelling in a lift. But no. Apparently this one has a salute (the quenelle) that he insists is merely anti-establishment rather than anti-Semitic, but which his fans keep doing outside synagogues. Awkwardly.
What I want to suggest, albeit with the caution required when one conflates a story that is quite silly with one that is entirely horrid, is that these two strange and very French stories are perhaps more closely linked than they appear.
On the Hollandaise sauce, France appears convulsed by doublethink. According to their quality press, the French are far too restrained and worldly to be interested in this sort of stuff, unlike silly, prurient Anglo-Saxons. And yet, after Closer magazine broke the story, those same restrained and worldly folk bought 600,000 copies in 24 hours.
I’m as prurient as anything. Speaking as a Brit and a hack, I find it frankly bizarre that there could even be a debate over whether an electorate has the right to know whether the man it elected has started secretly boffing an actress. What clarifies it for me, I suppose, is the question of precisely which bit of Mr Hollande it is that is doing the boffing. By which I mean (stop sniggering), was it the President or was it the man?
Mr Hollande himself, obviously, would say the first. According to his lawyer, the President “greatly deplores the invasion of his privacy, to which he has a right, as any citizen does”. Except that he’s not “any citizen”. Or, to put it less delicately, if the French President were actually the provincial, humourless dentist he so closely resembles, the reasonable suspicion has to be that he wouldn’t get to hang out with Julie Gayet in the first place. This is very much a position, you might say, that his voters voted him into.
At any rate, that age-old question — “does the public have a right to know?” — betrays its own, establishment-friendly prejudices. What it suggests is that the public’s not knowing is the neutral, invariably desirable state, and that any disruption of it must be justified. Whereas, particularly these days, a better question might be whether, if those who already know include a media committed to the scrutiny of the powerful, do they have the right not to tell everybody else?
Perhaps peculiarly, it’s easier to argue that the media should hush up big stories than little ones. When the upshot could be war, revolution or diplomatic disaster, publication is a weighty moral call. When the upshot is merely presidential blushes, however, suppression of a story looks a lot like back-scratching. It looks paternalistic, and cliquey. It looks like an establishment looking out for itself.
This is dangerous. In fact, it brings us all the way back to Dieudonné. You won’t find me suggesting that he’s not an anti-Semite, because he plainly is one. What he bills himself as, however, is an anti-establishment populist, perhaps along the lines of Beppe Grillo in Italy, or even Russell Brand here, not that either, of course, deserves the slur of the comparison.
It would take a psychologist to explain why anti-establishment politics in many countries slide so easily into anti-Semitism, and I’m often grateful to live in one of those rare ones where they tend not to.
Living in a culture in which newspaper editors conspire to protect politicians caught with their pants down does not, in any way, justify the nastiness of men like Dieudonné, or the historically illiterate and frankly paranoid politics of his fans. I do wonder, nonetheless, if it helps to cause both. It is not pleasant when those in power exclude you and talk behind their hands to each other about things they clearly think you are not worthy to know. It makes you resent and dislike them, and you begin to feel they are not on your side. And when you go look for somebody who is, the nutters lie in wait.
Over here we’re simply not so big on conspiracy theories about power, anti-Semitic or otherwise. And when our politicians drop their trousers, we tend to know about it.
The Sunday Times carried a rather nauseating interview with Anne Sinclair yesterday - the wife of Dominique Strauss-Khan (DSK).
I couldn't bear to inflict the whole of this boring and entirely self-serving piece on A4ES readers - so here are just a few 'highlights' to explain why Anne insists on standing by her man.
"Hands off — he’s mine"
"The hugely rich wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn is standing by her man, despite the messy end of his political dreams
Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer has offered the memorable defence that his client could not have known that the women were prostitutes because they were naked, and therefore indistinguishable from other women, when he met them. Neither this, though, nor any of the other lurid testimony being leaked to the press from the so-called "Carlton affair" has prevented Sinclair from following the advice of the famous Tammy Wynette song, Stand by Your Man
Y ou would think that she might have a nervous tic, at least, or bags under her eyes, but Anne Sinclair, the wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, strolls into the lobby of a chic Paris hotel with the insouciance and bounce of a model in a shampoo advert.
Her eyes twinkle as she tosses back her raven mane with a dazzling smile. Beneath the black cape is a shiny black, leather tank top and tight, black trousers revealing a surprisingly svelte figure for a woman of 63.
Her critics — most of them women — are baffled by the fluffy, carefree demeanour and her decision not to leave “Le Perv”, as a New York tabloid called her husband. And that was before details emerged of hotel room parties with prostitutes.
Sinclair is furious about other women putting themselves “in my place” and ordering her to jump ship. “Nobody can tell me what to do,” she says in her first interview with a foreign publication since Strauss-Kahn was accused last year of trying to rape a hotel maid in New York. “Nobody”, she adds, over a cup of herbal tea, “should be giving me advice.”
To many commentators her wifely devotion to the man who might have been France’s next president has gone way beyond the call of duty. Sinclair, whose family fortune comes from her maternal grandfather — he discovered Picasso, Braque and Matisse — did not hesitate to stump up the £3.7m bail required to get her husband out of jail in New York.
He was eventually acquitted but his troubles have only grown since then: the statute of limitations has expired on an alleged assault in Paris in 2003 but now he is embroiled in another scandal over allegations that, in between running the world’s economy as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), he cavorted with prostitutes in the company of friends who put the women on their company expenses.
Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer has offered the memorable defence that his client could not have known that the women were prostitutes because they were naked, and therefore indistinguishable from other women, when he met them. Neither this, though, nor any of the other lurid testimony being leaked to the press from the so-called “Carlton affair” has prevented Sinclair from following the advice of the famous Tammy Wynette song, Stand by Your Man.
A flicker of concern momentarily clouds her wrinkle-free features when the subject of her loyalty to DSK comes up over breakfast with The Sunday Times last Tuesday. Then the electric blue eyes twinkle again — this time with defiance.
“I don’t interfere in other people’s lives,” she says, huskily. “So I demand that people don’t interfere in mine. It concerns only me, my family and friends, if I want to talk to them about it.”
She is said to have once flung down her napkin and stormed out of a restaurant when a friend, fearing that she was in denial, confronted her with the dark side of what some DSK supporters have called his unconventional “lifestyle choice”; but she keeps her cool while verbally carving up “so-called feminists” in between sips of tisane.
“I’ve always fought for equality between men and women,” she says. “That’s the real battle. But telling other people how to live their lives in the name of feminism — that I don’t accept.”
Anne Sinclair has recently been appointed head of the Huffington Post in France France was transfixed and horrified by DSK’s downfall last May. One day he was the putative next president, the next he was in handcuffs in the US, an alleged sexual predator, a “rutting chimpanzee”, as one of his other alleged victims described him. How had it come to this?
The scandal challenged the tacit understanding between France’s rulers and their subjects that, in exchange for being looked after with lavish benefits, the people would let their politicians enjoy the spoils of power, and the press would not intrude on their often colourful private lives. It also threw a harsh light on French patriarchal society — in which “seduction” is often described as an “art” and sexual relations with servants have their own term, les amours ancillaires.
If DSK had had an encounter with a hotel maid in Paris instead of New York, the chances are that the world would have been none the wiser. Claims by Tristane Banon, the novelist, to have been assaulted by him in 2003 went largely ignored until Nafissatou Diallo, his target in New York, blew the whistle.
Now the French are putting themselves on the analyst’s couch, wondering if their belief in the gallantry of seduction has simply been a cover for sexual abuse by dirty old men.
The media seem determined not to miss any lurid detail in the unfolding drama. The papers have been filled with the testimony that young women have offered to police about their lucrative evenings with DSK in luxury hotels from Paris to Washington.
One account leaked to the press describes him forcing himself roughly on a prostitute in the lavatory of a Parisian nightclub when he was head of the IMF before going on to an expensive hotel suite where several couples frolicked naked by a swimming pool. Women were flown out to Washington for DSK’s pleasure, sometimes introduced to IMF staff as visiting Parisian secretaries. The trips were organised by French businessmen who wanted to ingratiate themselves with the man they hoped would be president. What better way to bond than at an orgy? We’ve crossed a line. We haven’t been able to re-establish boundaries between the private and public.
Henri Leclerc, one of his lawyers, claimed that DSK had no idea that he was with prostitutes as “in these parties, you’re not necessarily dressed. I defy you to tell the difference between a nude prostitute and a nude woman of quality.”
Sinclair says nothing about such grotesque antics but obviously hankers for the days when the press knew its place. “We’ve lost our bearings [in the French media],” she says. “We’ve crossed a line. We haven’t been able to re-establish boundaries between the private and public. I hope that they can be re-established.”
After giving up interviewing 15 years ago, Sinclair went into media management; and she recently became the head of the French branch of The Huffington Post. Despite her obvious reservations, she insists that the news website will not shy away from covering the story of her husband’s fall from grace.
The test will be particularly tough this month. After being grilled for two days in February by investigators in Lille, her husband will face legal proceedings on the other side of the Atlantic on Thursday. The criminal case in New York was dropped but his lawyers must appear before a judge to defend him against a civil lawsuit filed by Diallo. In it, she claims that DSK forced her to have oral sex
He is also expected to be brought before Lille’s investigating magistrates on March 28 on charges linked to prostitution and corruption. Could he end up in prison again?"
What troubles me is how an otherwise intelligent person can fail to see that the misuse of wealth and power to exploit women - is not a serious or feminist issue.
Even more so when a person occupies a public position - because public trust and confidence are being misused for someone's personal gratification.
The hypocrisy of the people involved is quite staggering - makes me wonder about the state of the French Soclialist Party these days.
France’s elite believes Hollande’s affair should stay private. No wonder its people are attracted to extremism
The absurdities and flaws of other countries are always easier to spot than those of your own. Viewed from anywhere right now, however, those of France look pretty glaring.
No, it’s not the scooter. I mean, come on. Perhaps you missed our own Deputy Prime Minister on the radio this weekend, cautiously suggesting that he could probably handle the Shadow Chancellor in a fight because he recently started kickboxing lessons. My point being that when it comes to leaders who want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger but actually look like Gareth from The Office, well, we Brits are in no position to snigger.
More uniquely and Frenchly problematic, however, is the apparent turmoil over whether they all even ought to know about François Hollande’s adventures with scooting and an actress and only owning one pair of shoes and the rest of it, or whether they ought to tug their forelocks, avert their eyes, and get back to all (one assumes) having affairs of their own.
Meanwhile, and far less fun, the French are trying to figure out what to do about Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, a comedian who once ran for office as “the anti-Zionist party” and keeps saying nasty things about the Holocaust. Personally I’m surprised about this, as you probably are, because I too was under the impression that French comedians restricted their repertoires to doing those mimes where they pretend to be trapped inside a box or travelling in a lift. But no. Apparently this one has a salute (the quenelle) that he insists is merely anti-establishment rather than anti-Semitic, but which his fans keep doing outside synagogues. Awkwardly.
What I want to suggest, albeit with the caution required when one conflates a story that is quite silly with one that is entirely horrid, is that these two strange and very French stories are perhaps more closely linked than they appear.
On the Hollandaise sauce, France appears convulsed by doublethink. According to their quality press, the French are far too restrained and worldly to be interested in this sort of stuff, unlike silly, prurient Anglo-Saxons. And yet, after Closer magazine broke the story, those same restrained and worldly folk bought 600,000 copies in 24 hours.
I’m as prurient as anything. Speaking as a Brit and a hack, I find it frankly bizarre that there could even be a debate over whether an electorate has the right to know whether the man it elected has started secretly boffing an actress. What clarifies it for me, I suppose, is the question of precisely which bit of Mr Hollande it is that is doing the boffing. By which I mean (stop sniggering), was it the President or was it the man?
Mr Hollande himself, obviously, would say the first. According to his lawyer, the President “greatly deplores the invasion of his privacy, to which he has a right, as any citizen does”. Except that he’s not “any citizen”. Or, to put it less delicately, if the French President were actually the provincial, humourless dentist he so closely resembles, the reasonable suspicion has to be that he wouldn’t get to hang out with Julie Gayet in the first place. This is very much a position, you might say, that his voters voted him into.
At any rate, that age-old question — “does the public have a right to know?” — betrays its own, establishment-friendly prejudices. What it suggests is that the public’s not knowing is the neutral, invariably desirable state, and that any disruption of it must be justified. Whereas, particularly these days, a better question might be whether, if those who already know include a media committed to the scrutiny of the powerful, do they have the right not to tell everybody else?
Perhaps peculiarly, it’s easier to argue that the media should hush up big stories than little ones. When the upshot could be war, revolution or diplomatic disaster, publication is a weighty moral call. When the upshot is merely presidential blushes, however, suppression of a story looks a lot like back-scratching. It looks paternalistic, and cliquey. It looks like an establishment looking out for itself.
This is dangerous. In fact, it brings us all the way back to Dieudonné. You won’t find me suggesting that he’s not an anti-Semite, because he plainly is one. What he bills himself as, however, is an anti-establishment populist, perhaps along the lines of Beppe Grillo in Italy, or even Russell Brand here, not that either, of course, deserves the slur of the comparison.
It would take a psychologist to explain why anti-establishment politics in many countries slide so easily into anti-Semitism, and I’m often grateful to live in one of those rare ones where they tend not to.
Living in a culture in which newspaper editors conspire to protect politicians caught with their pants down does not, in any way, justify the nastiness of men like Dieudonné, or the historically illiterate and frankly paranoid politics of his fans. I do wonder, nonetheless, if it helps to cause both. It is not pleasant when those in power exclude you and talk behind their hands to each other about things they clearly think you are not worthy to know. It makes you resent and dislike them, and you begin to feel they are not on your side. And when you go look for somebody who is, the nutters lie in wait.
Over here we’re simply not so big on conspiracy theories about power, anti-Semitic or otherwise. And when our politicians drop their trousers, we tend to know about it.
Stand By Your Man (12 March 2012)
The Sunday Times carried a rather nauseating interview with Anne Sinclair yesterday - the wife of Dominique Strauss-Khan (DSK).
I couldn't bear to inflict the whole of this boring and entirely self-serving piece on A4ES readers - so here are just a few 'highlights' to explain why Anne insists on standing by her man.
"Hands off — he’s mine"
"The hugely rich wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn is standing by her man, despite the messy end of his political dreams
Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer has offered the memorable defence that his client could not have known that the women were prostitutes because they were naked, and therefore indistinguishable from other women, when he met them. Neither this, though, nor any of the other lurid testimony being leaked to the press from the so-called "Carlton affair" has prevented Sinclair from following the advice of the famous Tammy Wynette song, Stand by Your Man
Y ou would think that she might have a nervous tic, at least, or bags under her eyes, but Anne Sinclair, the wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, strolls into the lobby of a chic Paris hotel with the insouciance and bounce of a model in a shampoo advert.
Her eyes twinkle as she tosses back her raven mane with a dazzling smile. Beneath the black cape is a shiny black, leather tank top and tight, black trousers revealing a surprisingly svelte figure for a woman of 63.
Her critics — most of them women — are baffled by the fluffy, carefree demeanour and her decision not to leave “Le Perv”, as a New York tabloid called her husband. And that was before details emerged of hotel room parties with prostitutes.
Sinclair is furious about other women putting themselves “in my place” and ordering her to jump ship. “Nobody can tell me what to do,” she says in her first interview with a foreign publication since Strauss-Kahn was accused last year of trying to rape a hotel maid in New York. “Nobody”, she adds, over a cup of herbal tea, “should be giving me advice.”
To many commentators her wifely devotion to the man who might have been France’s next president has gone way beyond the call of duty. Sinclair, whose family fortune comes from her maternal grandfather — he discovered Picasso, Braque and Matisse — did not hesitate to stump up the £3.7m bail required to get her husband out of jail in New York.
He was eventually acquitted but his troubles have only grown since then: the statute of limitations has expired on an alleged assault in Paris in 2003 but now he is embroiled in another scandal over allegations that, in between running the world’s economy as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), he cavorted with prostitutes in the company of friends who put the women on their company expenses.
Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer has offered the memorable defence that his client could not have known that the women were prostitutes because they were naked, and therefore indistinguishable from other women, when he met them. Neither this, though, nor any of the other lurid testimony being leaked to the press from the so-called “Carlton affair” has prevented Sinclair from following the advice of the famous Tammy Wynette song, Stand by Your Man.
A flicker of concern momentarily clouds her wrinkle-free features when the subject of her loyalty to DSK comes up over breakfast with The Sunday Times last Tuesday. Then the electric blue eyes twinkle again — this time with defiance.
“I don’t interfere in other people’s lives,” she says, huskily. “So I demand that people don’t interfere in mine. It concerns only me, my family and friends, if I want to talk to them about it.”
She is said to have once flung down her napkin and stormed out of a restaurant when a friend, fearing that she was in denial, confronted her with the dark side of what some DSK supporters have called his unconventional “lifestyle choice”; but she keeps her cool while verbally carving up “so-called feminists” in between sips of tisane.
“I’ve always fought for equality between men and women,” she says. “That’s the real battle. But telling other people how to live their lives in the name of feminism — that I don’t accept.”
Anne Sinclair has recently been appointed head of the Huffington Post in France France was transfixed and horrified by DSK’s downfall last May. One day he was the putative next president, the next he was in handcuffs in the US, an alleged sexual predator, a “rutting chimpanzee”, as one of his other alleged victims described him. How had it come to this?
The scandal challenged the tacit understanding between France’s rulers and their subjects that, in exchange for being looked after with lavish benefits, the people would let their politicians enjoy the spoils of power, and the press would not intrude on their often colourful private lives. It also threw a harsh light on French patriarchal society — in which “seduction” is often described as an “art” and sexual relations with servants have their own term, les amours ancillaires.
If DSK had had an encounter with a hotel maid in Paris instead of New York, the chances are that the world would have been none the wiser. Claims by Tristane Banon, the novelist, to have been assaulted by him in 2003 went largely ignored until Nafissatou Diallo, his target in New York, blew the whistle.
Now the French are putting themselves on the analyst’s couch, wondering if their belief in the gallantry of seduction has simply been a cover for sexual abuse by dirty old men.
The media seem determined not to miss any lurid detail in the unfolding drama. The papers have been filled with the testimony that young women have offered to police about their lucrative evenings with DSK in luxury hotels from Paris to Washington.
One account leaked to the press describes him forcing himself roughly on a prostitute in the lavatory of a Parisian nightclub when he was head of the IMF before going on to an expensive hotel suite where several couples frolicked naked by a swimming pool. Women were flown out to Washington for DSK’s pleasure, sometimes introduced to IMF staff as visiting Parisian secretaries. The trips were organised by French businessmen who wanted to ingratiate themselves with the man they hoped would be president. What better way to bond than at an orgy? We’ve crossed a line. We haven’t been able to re-establish boundaries between the private and public.
Henri Leclerc, one of his lawyers, claimed that DSK had no idea that he was with prostitutes as “in these parties, you’re not necessarily dressed. I defy you to tell the difference between a nude prostitute and a nude woman of quality.”
Sinclair says nothing about such grotesque antics but obviously hankers for the days when the press knew its place. “We’ve lost our bearings [in the French media],” she says. “We’ve crossed a line. We haven’t been able to re-establish boundaries between the private and public. I hope that they can be re-established.”
After giving up interviewing 15 years ago, Sinclair went into media management; and she recently became the head of the French branch of The Huffington Post. Despite her obvious reservations, she insists that the news website will not shy away from covering the story of her husband’s fall from grace.
The test will be particularly tough this month. After being grilled for two days in February by investigators in Lille, her husband will face legal proceedings on the other side of the Atlantic on Thursday. The criminal case in New York was dropped but his lawyers must appear before a judge to defend him against a civil lawsuit filed by Diallo. In it, she claims that DSK forced her to have oral sex
He is also expected to be brought before Lille’s investigating magistrates on March 28 on charges linked to prostitution and corruption. Could he end up in prison again?"
What troubles me is how an otherwise intelligent person can fail to see that the misuse of wealth and power to exploit women - is not a serious or feminist issue.
Even more so when a person occupies a public position - because public trust and confidence are being misused for someone's personal gratification.
The hypocrisy of the people involved is quite staggering - makes me wonder about the state of the French Soclialist Party these days.
Hot Bunny (12 March 2012)
Dominique Strauss-Khan (DSK) received a hot reception at the Cambridge Union Society the other night - but not the kind he might have hoped for given his reputation as a 'hot bunny' - or 'chaud lapin' as they say in France.
The former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - who is embroiled in a series of nasty sex scandals - was invited to speak on his second favourite subject: world finance and economics.
But DSK is a thoroughly discredited figure these days - so why the Cambridge Union Society or anyone else would be interested in what he had to say - is a bit of a mystery.
And I'm pleased to say that many of the local student population seem to agree - because the one-time French presidential hopeful was met with jeers as he arrived - while protesters scuffled with police.
Now I'm all in favour of free speech - but I can't think of a good reason for DSK to be invited to speak to such an audience - apart from a cheap publicity stunt.
Criminal charges against DSK may have been drooped over claims that he attacked a hotel chambermaid - Nafissatou Diallo - in New York.
But he also faces another complaint of sexual assault from a young French women - Tristane Banon - and is currently under investigation by French police for his alleged involvement in a prostitution racket.
So whatever his views on world finance and economics - he clearly has a 'trouser problem' and all the sexual morals of an alley cat.
For some reason journalists were forbidden to hear DSK's speech but one student in the audience told reporters the French politician had been asked one question about the chambermaid incident and told listeners he had been 'acquitted'.
Which is strictly speaking is true - but conveniently ignores the fact that the chambermaid may bring a civil case against DSK - and his deplorable 'tom-catting' sexual behaviour for a 62-year-old man who is happily married to a successful wife - Anne Sinclair.
Anne has stood by her man throughout these events - for reasons which are not obvious tome - but which seem to revolve around a belief that this self-confessed serial adulterer - is not also a serial abuser of women.
Strange what some French people seem to regard as acceptable behaviour - sophisticated even - don't you think?
As if the private and public lives of such wealthy and powerful men don't overlap - on their travels around the world on official business.
So I take my hat off to the Cambridge students who organised the protest.
This champagne socialist may be entitled to his views - but the 'hot bunny' deserves to be met with a hot reception wherever he goes.
