Penelope Fillon
This is not intended to persuade François and Penelope Fillon, future president and first lady of France unless the odious Front National gets in their way, that an exclusive interview should be accorded to Monsieur Salut, one of the Anglo-Saxon world's most Francophile commentators on France and French affairs. But should that be the outcome, tant mieux
One grew up a solicitor's daughter in the Welsh market town of Abergavenny, the other in a flat above her dad's barber shop in rue Nationale, a long shopping street in the French city of Le Mans.
But the lives of Penelope Clarke, the Welsh woman who may well become First Lady of France as wife of the centre-right favourite for the presidency François Fillon, and Joëlle Randall, First Lady of Shildon, the County Durham home town of an English hack, have several common features.
One left Wales to experience life in France, had good French and chose Le Mans as the place to go as a teaching assistant. The other had good English and left Le Mans to experience life in the UK and became an au pair in the market town of Darlington.
Neither necessarily expected to find the men of their lives, but both did. In the case of Joëlle, for whom Darlington was merely the first part of a plan that involved moving next to Madrid to perfect her Spanish, a visit to the Spinning Wheel folk club introduced her to me. Penny Clarke, who had plans to follow her father into law, met François at a dinner attended by both.
No Spain for Joëlle, no sparkling legal career for Penny. One got as far as London, but turned to National bus services for trips back to the North East. The other returned to study law at Bristol University but developed her own long-distance romance, with François whizzing across the Channel at every opportunity.
Like Joëlle, François was sent to a good private Catholic school in Le Mans. He attended the Notre-Dame de Sainte-Croix lycée, she went to the Ecole Collège Saint-Joseph.
My well-behaved future wife broadly obeyed the nuns of Saint-Joseph's, while occasionally feeling a ruler across her knuckles for minor infractions and always resisting their career advice that she too should become a bride of Christ. She went on to the lycée Saint-Charles for her baccalauréat.
Colin and Joëlle, married in Le Mans
François was a little more rebellious, his misdemeanours taking the more advanced form of leading a protest against a hopeless English teacher and setting off a tear-gas capsule in class.
One school report recommended a mixture of "less self-indulgence, more courage in getting down to some work and more modesty" (and here, I cannot adopt high moral ground since one of mine said, damningly, "mathematics apart, not good enough for a grammar school").
Somewhere along the way, François became passionate about motor sport. If you're from Le Mans, or nearby, it goes with the territory.
François has even compared his astonishing rise from dark horse in what was seen as a straightforward Sarkozy-Juppé race for Les Républicans' nomination to Jacky Ickx, the Belgian winner of the 1969 Le Mans race. "He began in last place, finished first," he said, while also noting between the first and decisive second rounds of the primaries that whereas Ickx won by historically narrow margin, 120 metres, he was several laps ahead (as he remained, indeed improved upon, in the run-off).
François has no reason to know that in my frequent visits to his city, my city-in-law, I pick up morsels of information - not always in the public domain already - about his political activities.
Nor will he know that Joëlle remembers an occasion nearly half a century ago when she attended her grandparents' golden wedding celebrations in a restaurant in his home village of Cérans-Foulletourte. Nor that while François harboured thoughts of being a journalist, Joëlle's husband had turned such thoughts into practice (Francois may have seen the light after two internships with Agence France-Presse, in Spain and Belgium, and - like Penny - opted instead for law). She never practised; he quickly became a career politician.
What François Fillon could and should care about is the view of his voters.
My brother-in-law in Le Mans, and his wife, had no difficulty in supporting him in the primaries. Brother-in-law said he was pleased to have voted "for someone" whereas others, including fellow-Sarthois, had simply voted "against Sarkozy". That is not surprising; as well as being a fellow-Sarthois, he gives the impression of being a thoroughly decent man who cares deeply about country and family.
But my beau-frère also had words of caution for the man he wants to be president.
François - I can hardly start calling him anything else in this kind of article - is known to be an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and is intent on slashing hundreds of thousands of public service jobs (to facilitate tax cuts that, speculatively, might aid business and therefore create private sector employment).
That does not appeal to me one little bit as a recipe for success and still less does it suggest a tranquil presidency free of the turbulence and strikes that generally force humiliating about-turns in France. He also has a soft spot for Vladimir Putin that seems to overlook the Russian president's warlike tendencies and bleak authoritarianism.
The hope, as transmitted to me from Le Mans, is that having won the primaries, our François will now see the sense of moderating his views. François himself insists he is not some "medieval reactionary".
So far, he has Joëlle's vote, more because he is not Sarko or Juppé, and certainly because he is not Marine Le Pen, than because he is Fillon, though I should acknowledge that he has impressed her, too, in many ways.
To keep that vote, he perhaps needs to show that he is a man for all the French people, not all those who do happen not to belong to trade unions or work in local and national government.
Recent Comments