Salut!

The way to treat a lady

Even as Nicolas Sarkozy formally announces what everyone has known for years - that he intends to stand for the French presidency - an eye-catching trip by Ségolène Royal to the Middle East threatens to steal his thunder.

Sarko undeniably represents a
formidable obstacle to Mme Royal's hopes of becoming the first female
president.
But just how formidable is becoming increasingly tricky to gauge as the
Ségo phenomenon continues to achieve the improbable - making French
politics interesting outside France in what is still a non-election
year. International attention packs little electoral muscle, of course.
Yet even that works both ways; a lot of the overseas support for Sarko
tends to come from the sort of conservatives from whom millions of
French voters would run a kilometre or two.
At home, Sarko plainly has work to do, and an illuminating vox pop in Le Figaro
offers a little advice on how he should treat a lady when that lady
stands between him and the Elysée.
The paper canvassed the views of several prominent females from the
party and the responses revealed hints of anxiety that M Sarkozy's
tendency to shoot first and reflect later may cost him votes.
"Nicolas must take care not to be aggressive, but to tackle her ideas
and not the person," warned Isabelle Debré, a UMP senator. "The
slightest gesture could be raise charges of misogyny."
Arlette Franco, from the western Pyrénées, wanted to see more of a side
to Sarko that we generally encounter only when he is having one of his
marital reconciliations.
"He needs to offer reassurance, to show himself to be warm, human and
interested in social questions as well as security," she said.
Another Arlette - Grosskost,
from Haut-Rhin - suggested that Sarko should surround himself with more
women, lighten his hard-line image and acknowledge that Mme Royal's
appeal by-passed political logic.
And a Parisian MP, Martine Aurillac, went so far as to offer the sort
of counsel even France's macho hommes politiques would consider patronising: "Don't launch into discussions that are too technical, statistical, complicated."

Her theme was taken up by Valérie Pécresse,
spokesman for the centre-Right UMP party of which Sarko is president.
Confronting a female opponent, she said, was to be engaged not in a
classic clash of forces but in a clash of conviction.
"You have to address the people in very simple terms," she said, while
adding loyally that Sarko understood this parfaitement.

The subtext of all this is clear enough. Sarko may be capable
of tearing Ségo apart in contentious debate, but should weigh up whether it would actually do him much good?

We know
Mme Royal has so far shown little substance to go with the lashings of
style, a point of view that surfaced in France long before it became a
British media cliché.
It has done her little damage in the polls. One of my own human
barometers of middle France opinion, a middle-aged, mid-management bank
employee (and typical UMP voter) living in the provinces, summed it up
quite neatly.
"You say we don't know what she stands for, that she is woolly on the
main issues," he said. "I think that's part of what the French like
about her. There's less to be scared of."
Sarko profits this week from a flurry of attention surrounding his
announcement. But unless Ségo commits some appalling gaffe in Lebanon,
Israel or the Palestinian territories, she stands a good chance of
bagging at least equal airtime and headlines for the right reasons.
Adding a thought after the event, it is even possible to say
that when the gaffe came - failing to slap down a Hizbollah attempt to
equate Israel with the Nazis - she and her supporters performed some
smart wriggling.
We should all stand by, I'd guess, for a little more evidence of Ségo
steel in the coming weeks and months, and for the odd sign of a
mellower Sarko.
He may have taken heed of those female colleagues already. The famous
promise of "rupture" - implying a complete break with failed policies
of France's recent past, however this might enrage surly unions and
those desperate to cling to outdated privilege - has already been
watered down.
Now, he says, it will be a "peaceful rupture".

Labels: election, Elysée, Hizbollah, Le Figaro, Parti Socialiste, president, Sarkozy, Ségolène, UMP

Le vice franglais

In the 25 intervening years, Jack Lang has probably forgotten the letter from an indignant French woman that dropped on his or, more likely, an underling's desk. He was François Mitterrand's culture minister. She wanted to know how, with the French language under such pressure from Anglo-American influences, state-owned TV could allow a newscaster to report smooth traffic flow one big holiday weekend while seated in front of the slogan ça roule cool.

These days, with the threat to la francophonie greater still, the phrase would be sure to bring a nomination for le Prix de la Carpette anglaise,
the "English Doormat" awarded each year since 1999 to the person or
organisation deemed to have delivered the year's most grievous insult
to French.
The admirably Canute-like souls who run the contest have just announced the short list for this year's Carpette.

Up for the 2006 prix d'idignité civique are:

* France's national research agency, ANR, for launching an appeal for ideas to which responses must be in English

* Jean-Marc Ayrault, the mayor of Nantes and president of socialist deputés in the French parliament, for launching a public transport system called Busway and an on-line service Mail in Nantes

* Philippe Baudillon, France 2's director general, for allowing programmes called Top of the Pops and Dancing Show to be screened

* Christian Brodhag, inter-ministerial delegate for development, for publishing a report on coal in English

* Henri de Castries, head of the Axa group, for declaring French to be a disadvantage in a competitive world.

* France's Constitutional Council
for accepting as constitutionally sound the notion that text in English
or German should be admissible under French law
M Baudillon or the Constitutional Council would seem good bets, though
it is not difficult to imagine the sheer anguish any of these offences
against the purity of French language will have caused. There is a
special international prize, too. The ex-minister and co-founder of
Médecins sans frontières Bernard Kouchner is in the running for saying
in his book Two or Three Things I know About Us - (oops, I meant Deux ou Trois Choses Je Sais de Nous) - that English is the future of la francophonie.
So are "the European institutions in their entirety" for daring to
choose "Together Since 1957" as the slogan to mark the golden
anniversary of the Treaty of Rome.
Ernest-Antoine Seillière, president of the European Business
Confederation (UNICE), is my favourite, but perhaps only because his
crime - beginning a Brussels speech, as he fully intended to go on, in
English - prompted a stage-managed and slightly absurd walk-out by
President Chirac.
May the best homme or cultural hommelette win.

But it's probably safe to make a couple of assumptions.

Le vainqueur won't turn up to collect his prize. And there is
no risk of the owners of Café Rouge or Prêt à Manger, or anyone who has
ever wished a friend bon appétit or boasted about his pied-à-terre,
being shortlisted in tit-for-tat English awards.
One last thing. My wife's horror at ça roule cool
did provoke a reply from Mr Lang's ministry. They took a couple of
months to get round to writing and did little more than rattle off
platitudes about the importance M Lang naturally attached to supporting
his native tongue.

Le vice français

Off to Britain again for most of the next five days but will do my best to keep in touch with Salut!. With more time, I would have talked about the Paris St Germain fan shot dead by a black police officer in Paris in disturbances after a PSG defeat by Tel Aviv. All I know is what I have read and heard, and this includes references to the officer trying to protect a Jew being attacked by PSG fans. PSG is a club with a dreadful hooliganism problem - almost turning one of our (English) vices, now under control if not quite conquered, into le vice français - and sometimes seems locked in a neanderthal age. You don't like us and we don't care, as the Millwall yobs like to put it, and if they cannot find Jews, blacks or rival supporters to fight, they fight among themselves. Or I might have brought you news of how young French people view the presidential race: essentially no way Sarko, maybe Ségo. But all this must wait until I have more time to spend with my computer. That will come and soon. Bon weekend.

Coming out as a Colin

It looks as if Salut! is about to breeze past another milestone. Having clocked up 1,000 profile views by yesterday, it seems certain that the number of visits will reach five figures some time today.

The truth is that we have already passed the 10,000 mark. Salut! had been in operation and attracting lots of readers for two-and-a-half weeks before I installed the counter.

Thanks for your interest or support, or both, and thanks also for the lively and - for the most part - acceptable debate and banter.

I felt sneaking sympathy for Colin Berry's daughter and the loyalty she quite properly showed towards her father.

It does seem to me that, within reason and the usual bounds of decency and the law, this site should be open to pretty much anyone.

Perhaps there are decent and lawful contributions still to come that I will feel, for one reason or another, ought to be discouraged. Mere disagreement with someone (as often occurs with Bill Taylor, close friend though he is, as well as with strangers, Colin Berry included) would not be such a reason.

But Corinne's deception, leading a poor chap on to think she cared enough about the footballing fortunes of Sunderland to look up the score from a lowly Saturday match, does present a tough test of my Voltaire-like advocacy of free speech.

Suspicions have been raised by others. And the fact that Corinne's, complete with apostrophe s,
rhymes passably with the way most French people pronounce my Christian name, and therefore Colin Berry's too, may be too much of a coincidence.

It is just possible that CB dislikes his first name. I will never be able to forget the day, a birthday come to that, when my name appeared prominently on one arts page feature, about Linda Thompson, only to be juxtaposed with another in which the actor Colin Firth lamented that he'd been lumbered with "the sort of name you give your goldfish".

But the evidence is still thin, whatever trouble people appear to have staying away each time they say they will. Why, even Natalie returned briefly, all smiles and forgiveness, despite my disapproval of Texan penal policies and the efforts of Richard of Orléans to impose a Frenchified H on her prénom.

It is for my namesake to declare himself if he chooses.

Anonymity and pseudonyms have their uses, and I would not wish to insist on everyone posting a proper identification.

If Corinne is Colin (B), however, then he is as guilty of stretching an amusing ruse a little too far as one or two others may have been of turning him into a punchbag.

Matt's gloss on a career

The learning curve will have to wait. Otherwise, much of the rest of my life will be spent trying to photograph and upload images. Memo to Salut!: buy yourself a scanner. But here they are. My three personalised Matt cartoons.

This is not a case of bragging. To possess a single Matt cartoon about oneself is an honour. To have three is undoubtedly a case of Christmas, birthday and winning flutter all coming together.

But I have posted them because anyone reading this blog will know at least something about the aspects of my life that inspired Matt, and because anything he draws is worth seeing. And while my trio of cartoons is impressive (or merely a reflection of my great age), one former colleague, Peter Floyd, who has triumphed over unpromising origins (he supports West Ham United) to become a thoroughly decent man, says he has five.

Mine trace obvious milestones.

* The canine gag marks my completion of 25 years on the Daily Telegraph in 2002. I had the choice of a gift worth £200 or a drinks party, presumably based on a similar value of booze, in the executive dining suite. I opted for the latter but felt obliged to put the same again behind the bar at the pub afterwards.

* The perplexed Parisians were brought to their window in Matt's imagination to welcome me on my arrival in Paris in July 2004.

And the parting shot. By a not too surprising coincidence, I had already decided - before seeing it - to mention "my date with the executioner" in the leaving party speech. Thanks again, Matt. And my former Telegraph reporting colleague, news editor, home editor and editor Martin Newland - Matt's wife is his wife's sister, as it happens and if you follow me - for an impossibly flattering mention elsewhere.

Matt: coming to the aid of the party

Tell Matt Pritchett you're writing a book that is bound to make a fortune, and offer to pay him for a few cartoons that would make that fortune bigger still, and he'll politely decline.

"If I started saying yes to all those things, I'd never see my children," he once explained.

But ask him to draw a cartoon for someone's leaving souvenir - a mock-up front page that newspaper people traditionally produce for a departing colleague - and the answer is invariably Yes.

As one responsible for a number of such pages when I worked in London, I never ceased to be amazed at the man's generosity with his time.

Often enough, he'd barely know the colleague in question; reading a draft of the main story for the page was enough for him to come up with an inspired image and/or gag.

On Friday, I found myself taking possession of my third personal Matt cartoon. He has given me permission to post it here, and I know he will not mind me adding the previous two once I get the hang** of it. All appear on the next Salut! posting - Matt's gloss on a career - but I have deleted the inferior reproduction of the latest cartoon that was originally here.

Matt could not make it to the Cheshire Cheese, the pub in Fleet Street (where else?) that I chose for my send-off, just as I had thrown parties there when I left the Press Association for the Telegraph and
London for Paris.

But I am glad to say that his final cartoon for me came along to the party, safely inserted at the foot of my spoof page one. There was also, in keeping with another tradition, a framed original.

Needless to say, the cartoon injects a little dignity into a page otherwise devoted to impertinent jibes about my tastes in music and football,
an alleged obsession with curries, seafood and foie gras of which I was naturally unaware and my dubious origins (brought up from infancy in County Durham but born, unpardonably, in Hove). That Matt is a genius
is beyond serious debate. No one needs to inspect or even know aboutthe fistful of awards to see how gifted he is. It shines from each work that is published and, since he submits six contenders daily for one or
at most two slots, from many that are not.

Perhaps most people would settle for being a genius at whatever it is they do. To be a great bloke as well as a genius lifts rarity to a new level.

** And apologies for the amateurish and uneven first attempt to post the cartoon. Almost any child of 10 could have done it properly in a fraction of the time it took me to do it badly.

Segomania

London, Friday. Even from the other side of the Channel, the victory of the gazelle over the elephants can be seen to have been pretty crushing. Segolene Royal faces a harder battle to reach the Elysee (no accents today, by the way). But she was comfortably the best equipped of the three socialist candidates to muster a strong challenge. Whatever admirable qualities Laurent Fabius and Dominique Strauss-Kahn possess, these did not rationally seem to include much prospect of being electable as president next spring. The Parti Socialiste members who voted emphatically to make Mme Royal their candidate clearly had no wish to hand a gilt-edged present to Nicolas Sarkozy - or, if Bernadette's latest thoughts on the subject are to be taken seriously, one Jacques Chirac. And while I am as yet unconvinced that she - Segolene, not Mme Chirac - would make a great president if elected, I do draw some satisfaction from her success, having indentified her as a serious potential candidate at a time when others, supposedly wiser, gave her no chance. I disagree with the view that Sego's triumph ensures a contest even more boring than usual. Surely she is at least less grey than either of her defeated rivals. And there will be all sorts of tests of her temperament, her Left wing credentials and her substance on the bigger issues of nation and world. There will be plenty of people, of the Left as well as the Right as has been seen in the dirty tricks produced in an attempt to undermine her campaign, eager to trip her up. Jack Lang, who withdrew from the socialists' nomination battle to support Segolene though you just know he thinks the French would really be better off with him, got it spot on in an eve-of-vote interview with France Soir. "You'll see in the coming days," he said. "The whole world's press will start taking an interest in our presidential elections and just because of her." M Lang's other proposition - that Segolene may be the best option for the French merely because she's a woman - is perhaps less compelling and Sarko can be trusted to do his utmost to tear it apart. Boring campaign? I think not.

France in flashes....2

Soon I will be leaving Paris, but not France. Two-and-a-half years in the City of Light is not much of a milestone but it's the longest I've lived anywhere outside London since the 1980s. Thanks to this Parisian phase of my life, and indeed to living in France generally, I am able to start listing - in no special order - a few of the things I now know. It is a work in progress; the number in the headline will change each time I have a flash of inspiration and want to add something. New thoughts will always appear at the top. ************** WHAT I KNOW NOW **************

* Policemen on roller skates and - when deployed as traffic cops - bicycles will always look like something out of a French farce.

* Marks & Spencer should be ordered to re-open its Paris store. Don't take my word for it; ask a native Parisian.

* The French are not the worst drivers in Europe and probably not even the second or third worst.

* Paris may not, despite a former colleague's insistence, be the City of a Thousand Bad Restaurants. But I am up to double figures and truly believe London now has a distinct edge on quality, variety and service - though not always value.

* Provincial France is still streets ahead for eating out. But my search for a good Indian restaurant here was doomed to failure.
* It is therapeutic to swear in English at psychopathic drivers who try
to mow you down on green at pedestrian crossings. But this is not
advisable if you happen to be having a mobile phone conversation with a
charming American lady at the same time. * If you want to find out something from a French ministry, make friends with a French official in London. Exposure to le modèle Anglo-Saxon will have given him a hint of urgency.
* Power walking or gentle jogging in the Tuileries is not recommended
for those liable to feel like physical wrecks in the presence of
superfit Parisian sapeurs pompiers.

* Arriving
on time, for dinner, drinks or similar, is a serious gaffe. Getting
there early is positively insulting and destined to bring social
exclusion.

* Gard du Nord handles people more efficiently than Waterloo. And no one there will try to serve you wine in a cardboard cup.

* Anna Perry ***
was right. The Champs Elysées may look pretty when lit up for Christmas
but feels ugly and naff most of the time and, at the bottom end,
menacing at night.
* Brits who want to live in France, but stick to English-speaking
ghettos and recoil in horror from any idea of integration, bring
disgrace on their country and should go home.
* French reality and game shows are even worse than those on British TV. And French television generally is dire.

* Leaving Paris on a TGV feels much better than coming back.

* Coming back to Paris on Eurostar feels much better than leaving.

*** Anna Perry is another casualty of the linking problem. If you want to see past references to her, go to the Telegraph blogs home page, click on foreign and then you find me as "archived" at the bottom of the list of foreign correspondents. Type her name into the search facility. Regulars will remember the makeover that left all early posts looking as if no one had replied. But go back to the very first in December 2005 and there is a link to the original version, complete with comments left at the time.

Qualities of mercy

Of two reports from Canada, both of which I must take at face value, one does deal with the Nathalie Gettliffe affair and one does not. When I express the hope that this wretched woman will be dealt with mercifully two weeks from now, I respectfully draw the sentencing judge's attention to the second matter, a quite extraordinary case that has nothing to do with her. I had just finished reading the Globe and Mail website account of the latest judicial attack on Gettliffe, this time by one Madam Justice Nicole Garson, when I saw another Canadian court report. Pair held teen girls as sex slaves, ran the headline to a story from the Court of Queen's Bench in Manitoba. The crimes of this evil pair, accused in connection with vile sexual assaults on two abducted girls aged 12 and 13, make for sickening reading. The woman's role included holding one victim by the shoulders while her companion raped her. She "played no part in the abduction", the judge said, but was guilty of forcible confinement. The couple have had their comeuppance. But those tough-on-crime, show-'em-no-compassion champions of Canadian justice who inhabit this blog will have some explaining to do if a Vancouver judge comes down heavily on Gettliffe when she is sentenced (I am told on Dec 1). For that comeuppance amounted, for our friendly neighbourhood sex fiends, to 10 years for the man, four for the woman. Credits for time served awaiting trial mean that man will serve only seven years for ruining two girls' lives. Astonishingly, his co-accused qualified for almost immediate release under the so-called two-for-one scheme taking account of her two years spent in custody. Nathalie Gettliffe was foolish and wrong to take her two children by her former husband, Scott Grant, to France in defiance of a court order. She may, as Judge Garson implied in the latest hearing, have begun criticising the religious activites of her former husband only after her flight. I remain of the view that the humanitarian approach would nevertheless have been to grant Gettliffe bail, on whatever terms Canadian judges chose to impose, rather than force her to give birth as a prisoner and keep that poor infant in jail for the first weeks of his life. That doesn't mean I swallow the more extravagant claims of some of Gettliffe's supporters about the treatment she has received in prison. I have no reliable information on suggestions that at least one suspected killer and people accused of serious drug offences have been freed on bail within the same jurisdiction that requires a heavily pregnant woman to be locked up in a child custody case. Nor do I see it as especially edifying to see Gettliffe putting herself up for the French presidency. Judge Garson appears to have made some compelling points, while refusing Gettliffe joint custody of Grant's children, about the effects of her actions. She had denied the children, she said, "permission to love their father" by taking them to France despite the court order and then vilifying him. While I would not like to give the impression that this seemed an even-handed judgment, Judge Garson did increase Gettliffe's disgracefully meagre access to the children. She also ordered that a neutral French speaker should be present at these meetings - once a fortnight under the more generous provisions - to prevent disparaging remarks about Grant or his religion. I am aware of no such order restraining Grant in what he says to the children (or the Canadian press) about their mother. But let us get back to the kidnappers and where I feel their treatment has some bearing on what the Gettliffe sentencing judge, whoever this turns out to be, has to decide. Assuming - big assumption, I know - that we now more or less know the worst about Gettliffe, is there a judge in British Columbia who could review the two cases and regard her as meriting a moment's further imprisonment? Another learned man of the bench has, after all, set down two years in pre-trial custody as a sanction stiff enough for a woman involved in what the Globe and Mail called "one of the province's most shocking sex crimes"?

Le blues du tennisman

The curse of the catamaran has struck again. Misfortune has followed misfortune since I introduced readers of the Telegraph blog to the crowd of French strangers, now friends, that I joined on holiday in the French Caribbean in February.

One of our number has seen his dry cleaning business collapse. He and his wife were then gassed as they slept,
awakening to find their home outside Paris cleaned out by burglars. Two
of us have lost our jobs.
At the weekend, it was Dominique's turn to recount a tale of woe.
Tall, lean and irritatingly handsome, Dominique is a successful tennis
coach, with a decent collection of trophies bearing witness to his own
playing skills.
He is also well read and sharp, with a magnetic personality. But as if
living in Seine St Denis, the often grim north Parisian suburb, were
not bad enough, he also seems to endure a somewhat patchy love life.
It must be said that insisting on playing in a tournament on his
wedding day was perhaps not the best start to his first marriage. I
only think
he is joking when he tells of trying to chat up a glamorous Swedish
blonde. While he understood her to accept a date for "neuf heures", she
knew she had actually replied in English: "Never."
But Dominique tells it so often that you start to feel something of the
sort must once have happened to him. Lately, however, life has been
looking up. He has a newish companion. And he was anxious to please her
with a holiday in the Maldives. The location looked wonderful, a sunny
break from the chilly French autumn seemed assured. Thanks to some
over-enthusiastic manoeuvrings by the lady driver of a forklift truck,
however, the excited couple got only as far as Charles de Gaulle
airport.
The woman's task, loading food trolleys on to the Airbus, seemed simple
enough. But according to local press accounts carefully cut out by
Dominique, she managed to dig the vehicle's forks into the fuselage of
the plane.
The damage was not discovered until technicians began final inspections
before take-off. The forklift driver had not reported the incident; one
of the newspaper stories said it was not clear whether she did not know
what she had done, or knew but panicked.
On balance, the 300-plus would-be holidaymakers were probably relieved
that departure was postponed.
They were less content to learn, and only then after a wait approaching
30 hours, that the damage could not be repaired in time and no
substitute aircraft was available. Dominique's relationship has so far
survived the disappointment and he has hopes of taking the same holiday
in February. But he still feels a little miffed at having switched
allegiance from the Partir Pas Cher travel company to one that turned out to be Partir Pas du Tout .
Out of the original party of 10 on that winter cruise around Martinique
and Guadeloupe, just five have so far remained untouched by the curse
and will be fervently hoping that it has run its course.
And if it hasn't? Since two of the five are gynaecologists, we can only
speculate as to what new mishaps lie ahead.