Graphic: Courtesy of Topito blog
Until a few seconds after 7am yesterday, I was looking forward to seeing publication within a day or so of a piece of mine about Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the gauche caviar.
Then the France Info newscaster began talking about the political landscape being turned upside down by barely credible events from New York.
It swept away the notion that any publication would be remotely interested in a whimsical item on what some in France inelegantly call Porschegate. DSK - as the world, as well as France, now knows him, had been photographed getting into a €100,000 Porsche, somehow considered by some to be a dreadful faux pas for a socialist pretender to the Elysée.
And the wall-to-coverage than ensued left me in no doubt that I would be spending most of my day trying to make sense of murky goings-on on the other side of the Atlantic.
How Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund and French presidential hopeful (both of which roles may soon need to be expressed in the past tense), must wish now that his troubles began and ended with gossip about frankly inconsequential details of an affluent lifestyle.
It may be some time before we know the truth about what happened in room 2806 of the Sofitel when DSK may or may not have encountered a chambermaid on Saturday.
But it is hardly an implausibly downbeat interpretation of his predicament to regard his grip on the IMF job, and his prospects of fighting Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012, as flimsy indeed.
My ignorance of the arrest had lasted until I set out for what was intended as a quiet outing along the French Riviera to Menton and turned on the car radio.
It reminded me of another Sunday morning 14 years ago. I was in one of those rare areas of England where mobile phone signals did not reach and my old-fashioned pager was lodged in the car outside, where it been beeping all night long as colleagues from the Telegraph tried to contact me.
“Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed have been killed in a crash while being chased by paparazzi in Paris,” my host announced as he knocked on the bedroom door with a cup of tea.
It would be an exaggeration to say conspiracy theories had started even before I’d had a chance to placate my superiors. They did not take long to surface, though they did take longer than comparable claims of dirty tricks in the case of DSK. On everyone’s lips, it seemed in France yesterday (or certainly in Menton, which I managed to see after all), was the suggestion that Strauss-Kahn had been set up.
By whom?
Enemies in the world of high international finance? But was not DSK, as the figurehead for the body that acts as custodian of the global financial system, credited with doing a decent job, grappling with the economic impediments of one sick man of Europe after another?
Political adversaries worried by his popularity in the polls? The man had not even declared himself a presidential election candidate, much as that was supposed to be a mere technicality. But don’t politicians always insist opinion polls a year before an actual election are meaningless?
Rogue French agents acting in what they deludedly thought to be the best interests of their country? An elaborate criminal sting? “I exclude nothing,” said one DSK ally on late night French television without having these various options set before him.
It all seemed far-fetched, even though a "close friend" of DSK had been quoted in France, even before the alleged assault on the NYC chambermaid, as saying the Elysée was orchestrating personal attacks on him. But at least the petty details of Porschegate were finally being shunted out of public scrutiny.
There was no longer reason to care whether it was an error of judgement for a man seeking to be a socialist leader of his people to be photographed in a posh car that was not even his.
It is true that DSK had suffered from comparison with François Mitterrand, the 30th anniversary of whose election as president was celebrated on May 21. We all know Mr Mitterrand, who occupied the Elysée for 14 years, had unconventional domestic arrangements but he presented an austere image and his memory is revered by much of the French left. Needless to say, the old Mitterrand slogan la force tranquile (calm strength) became la Porsche tranquile over the past week or two.
In an interview with the Journal du Dimanche a week before Strauss-Kahn was led from his Paris-bound plane at JFK airport, one staunch political supporter, Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, defended his lifestyle.
He said DSK, along with his independently wealth wife, the television journalist Anne Sinclair, had a “secular” approach to money that Nicolas Sarkozy – whom he accused of using public funds to put a gloss on a “calamitous” presidential record - could only dream of.
“They are as at ease with top decision-makers as with the people of Sarcelles (a poor Paris suburb),” he said. “We need men of state who can talk to anyone.”
The mind boggles at the kind of people Strauss-Kahn will be required to talk to, and mix with, in the coming weeks and months. And I also wonder how long Porsche will take to reconsider the mischievous little slogan they came up with to promote the swish Panomera S Hybrid the DSK/Sinclair couple were photographed stepping into: "We don't do politics, just great engineering."
* My immense thanks to the good people of the Hotel Royal Westminster in rainwswept Menton, where I was plonked in front of the only terminal with internet access and left to get on with composing my front page report for The National on DSK's more pressing problems.
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