(Via Andrew Stuttaford at The Corner) The Telegraph delivers more than we want to know about Jacques Chirac in All for one:
It's nothing new for politicians to be facing in several directions at once but Chirac has done so many turns he has to screw his socks on. Once a Eurosceptic, he now embraces the idea of a powerful, seamlessly-integrated EU - run by France and Germany. Once in favour of concentrating power in Paris, he now thinks it should all be handed out to the regions. Having once begged the far-Right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen to help him out of an electoral fix, he now says: "Confronted with hatred and intolerance, no deals, no debates are possible."What a guy! Much more by following the link, but the net is I wouldn't hire this guy to walk my dog.
Typically French, we might say - but there is nothing typical and only so much that is French about Chirac. "All his life," says Eric Zemmour, a Figaro journalist and author of a new presidential biography, "he has dreamed of being someone else."
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Jacques landed a weekend job as a "soda jerk" at a Howard Johnson's restaurant off-campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There he met and fell in love with a blonde 18-year-old from South Carolina called Florence Herlihy. She called him "honey child", and he called her "ma chérie", and they rode around in an old convertible with fins and white-wall tyres. "
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For all his vanity, and the over-larded pomp with which he tends to surround himself, he is a bistro man at heart. Give him a stuffed cabbage and a pichet of plonk, and his petit bourgeois, one-generation-from-the-peasantry provenance will rush to the surface and his eyes glaze over with gratitude.
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In it, Laumond portrays his boss as an insatiable bedroom athlete who specialised in high-speed conquests of secretaries and party workers. On one occasion he allegedly tried to seduce the Syrian President's wife during a state visit. Chirac was particularly tormented, claims Laumond, by any mention of the sexual successes of his rival and presidential predecessor, Mitterrand. "On hearing that Mitterrand had seduced a particular woman, Chirac would rage: 'What! He's had her as well!' Then the boss would set off in pursuit of the same lady, to even the score as it were."
Such matters, if discussed at all in public, tend to count for little in terms of French votes. Far more damaging is the whiff of corruption that has trailed Chirac since his earliest days in politics. His three terms as Mayor of Paris were notable for the remarkably high standard of living and many extended holidays that the Chiracs enjoyed. Jacques managed 45 solo trips to Japan alone. His claims to have become a sushi aficionado and sumo wrestling fan sounded reasonable enough. But where did the money come from? Chirac's personal finances at this time are the subject of a long-running, but currently stalled, investigation.
