As French families arrive at their summer houses and eagerly greet people they haven’t seen since last August, even before the car is unloaded they are exchanging raptures about the one subject which dominates conversation everywhere here: the Sarkozy couple. The euphoria is overwhelming and while it is both refreshing and invigorating to hear such a positive attitude sweeping France, its unanimity is disconcerting. Last night at dinner with a senior manager of Dassault, anyone even mildly questioning the new president or his wife was howled down (one guest said that even though it’s wonderful, surely it can’t last). If nobody actually used the word unpatriotic it was only because they were too polite. At one point I wanted gently to suggest that perhaps his fiscal and social security reforms might “just possibly” push France even deeper into its already very deep debt, but I felt it necessary to insert a preamble of maximum hyperbole worthy of a 19th century diplomat greeting some far-flung potentate (his extraordinary political skills, his finesse, the wonder that is his wife, the “justesse supreme” of his vision, his unique ability as a communicator, may he live forever and his limitless progeny bring glory to our galaxy) and even then my suggestion was pooh-poohed as irrelevant – in most people’s minds the national debt is now somehow part of a past era, a turned page, forgotten history and anyway Sarkozy, it is now commonly believed, can fix anything.

It is not only those on the right who find him irresistible – last week I had lunch with a couple who are members of the communist-inspired CGT union and while there was scant praise for Sarko, the criticism was muted: there was a resigned acceptance that France needs reform and Sarkozy is the only person capable of it. Like everyone else I talk to, they are relieved that the alternative to Sarkozy, Ségolène Royal, was not elected.

The Sarkozy-euphoria is of course generated by the media, most of which, as we all know, is owned by Sarkozy’s friends. What they are most anxious to highlight, or even create, are Sarkozy’s triumphs on the international scene: these are important partly because Sarkozy had little ministerial experience abroad and we need to show this was a Chiraquian oversight and nothing to do with the little man’s talent, partly because all French people, regardless of political persuasion, have a fervent desire that Sarkozy will make France one of the top nations in the world (again), with greater influence internationally than either Britain or even the United States. So the Sarkozy couple’s success in liberating six medics from Libya, under the noses of the EU and America, is hailed as a major international (French) triumph. As with the European summit on the revised treaty, Sarkozy is said to have done the impossible, to have succeeded where others have palpably failed.

He does indeed have the ability to blast obstacles out of the way and do quickly what others have laboriously struggled to bring to fruition. The speed with which he reacts and acts does make one wonder why everyone else takes so long. He did the same with the refugee centre at Calais in 2004, Sangatte. For years people had recognised that the centre was a problem, but did nothing about it. He went there as newly-minted minister of the interior, was horrified and with a click of the fingers closed it down: whether that was the best solution is still open to doubt. The refugees are still at Calais but instead of being fed and housed in a Red Cross centre, they roam the streets begging and sleep in bus shelters.

The same criticism might be levelled at his present triumph in Libya. It is of course wonderful that six lives were saved (and it was a political master-stroke to send, unannounced, his hitherto somewhat unpopular wife to do his bidding). It is equally wonderful if France’s know-how and money improves Libya’s ropey health system and prevents the infection of the HIV virus. Does it matter that Sarkozy’s motives have little to do with improving health systems and much to do with securing oil – Libya being Africa’s 3rd oil producer? If it is to dominate the world, after all, France needs oil as much as America.

Recently, America’s way of securing oil has been by going to war (and thus getting rid of unspeakable regimes), France’s way has been to use diplomacy and aid to bolster the same regimes. If the price of France’s future oil-supplies is propping-up Gaddafi’s regime, should we be concerned? (Sarkozy, after all, is not the first to welcome Gaddafi – Tony Blair went there in 2004 and the US restored diplomatic relations just over a year ago. Since then Gaddafi has complained bitterly that neither country has rewarded him “adequately” for not continuing with his programme of weapons of mass destruction.) But it is worth noting that Sarkozy’s burning desire to do business with the “Guide of the Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” is in direct continuity with Chirac’s closeness to Saddam during the worst part of that dictator’s regime – with the consequent involvement of certain French politicians and businessmen in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. It is also on a par with Chirac, Mitterrand and Giscard d’Estaing’s friendship and support for very corrupt West African dictators. For all Sarkozy’s talk of change, there are certain things in France that do not change: making friends with unsavoury dictators in order to ensure plentiful oil supplies would appear to be one. I would love to know what Bernard Kouchner, founder of Medecins sans frontiers, makes of it: he knew Iraq well (particularly Iraqi hospitals) and had a profound dislike of Saddam. Almost alone of all French political figures, he was courageously in favour of the American-led invasion in 2003 to get rid of him. Now he is Sarkozy’s Foreign Minister. Normally it would have been his department which brokered anything to do with Bulgarians in Libya or foreign aid, but he has been totally absent from this saga as his master and his master’s wife deal direct with Gaddafi over nuclear reactors and fighter aeroplanes – not that the Libyan leader is in the same category as Saddam, of course, but let’s face it, if he cared a jot about human rights and torture in his prisons, Gaddafi could have released the medics himself, unasked, eight years ago.

It’s all very well to pluck someone from the immigrant-filled estates and put them in government, it’s very decent to want to give people with west or north African roots a chance in a “civilised” society, but you’ve got to make sure first that they are the right person. Nicolas Sarkozy doesn’t seem very good at choosing the right person – or rather he chooses people for the wrong reason, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, chosen as a candidate for the IMF because Sarkozy wants to scatter the Socialist heavyweights into as many separate and distant corners as he can. But more glaring may be the mistake he appears to have made over Rachida Dati.

It seemed such a bold move, to make someone from the ghetto estates Minister of Justice, but he appointed her not for her merits (though she has many), not for the greater good of French justice but so that everyone would talk about him. Of course it worked – but sooner or later a minister of Justice has to do a job. Sarkozy handed her a ready-made law which he has been trying to get passed for a couple of years on minimum sentencing and treating recidivist minors as adults. She is doing her best to get it through parliament, but she does not have the necessary experience of that sort of work. How on earth could she have? After studying economics and public law at university, she worked in the accountancy department of the oil company Elf, while continuing her studies in economics and management. She worked in the audit department of Matra and then for the European Bank of Research and Development. She left there to work for the Lyonnaise des Eaux as a controller of management and general secretary in their project development office.

In 1997, after ten years in these different accounting and managerial posts, she enrolled for the 2 year course at the Ecole nationale de la magistrature. This is not to study law in the English or American sense, but the law connected with being an examining magistrate, a role in England done by the police. Basically it involves looking at a crime and deciding whether there is a case to answer, and if there is, assembling all the evidence to make a convincing court case. She graduated from there and spent four years working her way up through the courts first as an auditrice de justice, then as a juge commissaire and finally as a deputy prosecutor. Apparently she was not enamoured of a career as a magistrate because in 2003 she offered her services instead to Nicolas Sarkozy.

I first came across her in April 2006, when I asked Sarkozy’s press office if I could interview her for a Prospect article about the troubled immigrant estates 6 months after the November 2005 riots. Less of an interview, more of a chat with someone from those estates who has obviously succeeded, is how I put it to the press office. I had high hopes of getting it, having done a relatively flattering portrait of Sarkozy a short while before. But no, the request was turned down. It was suggested to me that Mme Dati was not ready for interviews (perhaps was not the type, she was after all, only an advisor) – in fact I don’t think anyone had interviewed her, and it was too much to ask her to start with the foreign press, even though she would have had handlers. So I was surprised when, just a short year later, Sarkozy made her Minister of Justice, where giving interviews would be the least of her problems.

In my post of the 5th July I said that Mme Dati was that day debating the law on minimum sentencing in the Senate. It was her very first experience of parliament – she is not elected, indeed given there are no members of the French parliament with a north or west African  background, she probably wouldn’t have been elected even if she had stood – but in France you can be a minister without having gone through the hard and often humiliating experience of trying to persuade strangers to vote for you. On that day she defended her law capably, although the photograph of her in Saturday’s Le Monde [not on the web version] showed her speaking to an empty chamber – perhaps 15 people were present. Everyone knew it was a law which a majority of magistrates do not want because it seems to take judgement out of their hands. For that and other reasons it was seriously mauled by that lion of French Justice, the Socialist Robert Badinter. Badinter was the minister of Justice responsible for pushing through the anti-death sentence law back in 1981. At nearly 80 there are few things he has not seen, and with over 25 years experience in politics after a successful career as a barrister he knows a thing or two about laws good, bad and indifferent. This one, he said in the senate, is useless, vexatious and potentially dangerous.

The next day the director of Mme Dati’s cabinet, Michel Dobkine, resigned. The director of a minister’s cabinet, often an énarque, is the civil servant who runs them. They are very senior and very important. Mme Dati had not chosen M. Dobkine and it may be that she wanted to choose someone she knew. He said he was resigning for personal reasons. One paper said that he was separating from his wife and could not give his whole attention to his job. Another said that pro-Dati people in the ministry had criticised him for going to pick up one of his children from school at 5.00 o’clock. I wondered whether if a mother did that she would be criticised – equality of the sexes has to work both ways.

Whatever the true reasons, yesterday three more senior advisors from her cabinet resigned – they did not give personal reasons. They did not have to – it is now accepted that Mme Dati is difficult to work with.

I see nothing wrong with that, except that Mme Dati knows next to nothing about the job she is doing, having had a minimum of experience in law and no experience in politics. Being Minister of Justice is a mighty job, being “difficult” in it when you don’t know what you’re doing is dangerous. Given that the new president wants to reform the law, and justice, he would have been better advised to choose someone as minister who understood both the law and how to reform it creatively, who also had the talent or experience to get those reforms accepted by people working in the profession. It would be rather like Gordon Brown asking a young Indian woman who had experience in one of the important but secondary medical spheres, with no experience of Parliament, to be Minister of Health and reform the NHS. However hard-working, ambitious and even intelligent the person, her chances of doing a good, lasting job would be minimal. If on top of that she threw her weight around in a dictatorial way, the result would almost certainly be catastrophic. The difference is that in Britain ministers are responsible to Parliament and thus the people, whereas under the 5th Constitution in France, ministers are responsible only to the president. They are bound to do his will. That is all Rachida Dati is there for. If you watch her listening to Badinter’s arguments in the Senate criticising her bill you may see that.

One noticeable change since the presidential and parliamentary elections in France has been the decline in interest in the blogosphere. In a sense this is inevitable – there’s far less to write about now. During the four month campaign there was an almost overwhelming choice of subjects for writers as well as readers – when you’d had your fill of Sarkozy you could flip to Ségolène Royal, across to François Bayrou then out to the quirky extremities with Le Pen and Bové. Those were the days! Now there is just one subject – Sarkozy. By dominating politics, by emasculating the opposition, he gives us little else to write about.

Just mentioning the names of his erstwhile rivals makes us realise how far we have travelled in two months. Already Royal & Co. feel like 1960’s has-beens. The fact that Sarkozy has chosen one of the people who failed even to be elected as a presidential candidate, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as a candidate to head the IMF says much about how far we have forgotten (and are no longer interested in) Messrs Royal, Bayrou, Le Pen and Bové (will Sarkozy offer him a personal amnesty on July 14^th? Or leave him to rot in the overcrowded dungeons of state? If he offers a pardon, would Bové accept it?).

During those heady days of the election campaign, DSK was excluded and reviled for being old fashion, fuddy-duddy, more elephantine than the worst Socialist elephants. Passé was too modern to describe his politics. Today he is honoured as Europe’s best-choice to run the IMF – for the simple reason that Sarkozy has singled him out (if no one apart from Junker of Luxembourg had suggested DSK, would other European leaders have even thought of him?). And those others, Royal, Bové et al., who incarnated a potentially new, exciting, re-vamped France are dismissed as being ridiculous and completely sans intérêt.

And of course (coming back to my starting point about declining interest in the blogosphere) during the campaign when blog-scribes like myself wanted to change scene or colour things differently we could discuss other blogs. But now, like those failed candidates, the much-hoped-for 5^th Power has also dissolved into the ether. The success of the EU summit at the end of June was the final nail in the coffin of the cinquième pouvoir, since the 27 countries agreed on how to get round and consign to the dustbin of history the French blogosphere’s only real achievement, the orchestration of a campaign against the Constitution in 2005. By agreeing that the reformed treaty will be voted by controllable national governments and not by the people, political orthodoxy has won a considerable victory, re-establishing itself as the first and only real power, and bloggers like myself have little else to look at other than Sarkozy – who remains fascinating but, rather like J.K. Rowling, he concentrates everything round the single narrative when sometimes we cry out for sub-plot.

Is the gloss wearing off already? Almost exactly two months after his election, France according to N. Sarkozy is already looking somewhat less rosy than he promised. Of course much of the blame for some of the problems, such as the ever-deepening social security debt, will be laid at the feet of his predecessor, although the depressing figures released yesterday relate to the whole of this year, not last. 12 billion euro is the projected deficit by the end of 2007, whereas only a few months ago the then minister of health promised that by Christmas everything would be under control, the sums balanced. That same ex-minister of health who failed to see the inevitable is today’s minister of work. Meanwhile the strategies for savings put forward by the present ministers of health and economy seem to convince no one: too late, too small and too silly.

In another sector, justice, the first bill of the Sarkozy era is coming before the senate today, having had a rocky ride, particularly from those who will have to work with it. It concerns minimum and fixed sentencing for recidivists, at the same time removing legal protection for recidivist minors: once the law is passed they will be sentenced as if adults. A tougher law on those who cannot keep to the straight and narrow is something Sarkozy promised all through the election campaign, and is the real reason he appointed Rachida Dati to be minister of justice: since most recidivists are said to come from the troubled ghettos, far more acceptable for someone of immigrant descent, particularly a compassionate young woman, to pass that sort of repressive law than a white male. But all Mme Dati’s former colleagues working in the law courts and with young offenders object to her bill, mainly because they believe repression (i.e. prison sentences) is not the answer. People are also wondering why there have to be so many penal reforms: this is the 11th since 2002, the last one coming into force only in March of this year.

On the subject of prisons there is also the vexed and highly charged question of amnesties. It is a French tradition that on the 14th July, to commemorate the destruction of that infamous prison the Bastille, the president lets loose upon society a large number of old lags from today’s prisons. These multiple amnesties have the practical effect of making space in the already over-crowded French prisons, so that more prisoners can be taken in after the summer spate of house-breaking (everyone gains from these long summer holidays). However, Sarkozy said last year that he was against such amnesties. But if he doesn’t amnesty then he is faced with three new problems: one is that the old lags, disappointed and with nothing to lose, will revolt during the summer (especially if it turns hot). Two is that unless he empties cells now, how can the prisons cope with September’s influx? Three is on top of that his new law being debated today will inevitably increase the number of prison sentences, thus making overcrowding even worse. Sarkozy is damned either way, and with nine days to go before he has to make his announcement, nobody knows which way he prefers to go.

In a very different league, but another example of the tarnish fast appearing on the Sarkozy regime, there is the rather silly problem of his wife’s credit card. Up until now, president’s wives have not had a state-funded credit card: their frocks were paid for by the state, certainly, but supervised and actually paid for by a department within the presidential palace. Not so for Cecilia, who wanted and got her own flexible friend (without telling anyone of course). Once it was leaked, this raised the problem of her legal status: having no mandate or special function, she has no legal right to spend public money, indeed her doing so is a misdemeanour. The reference is doubtless a veiled criticism of the fact that Cecilia failed to turn up to the official banquet and outings at the recent G8 summit – in other words “if you want us to put rags on your back, you’ve got to do the job.” Yesterday, to much jocularity in the press, she handed the card in. Apparently she had only used it twice, both times for lunches, one cost 129€ and the other 272€. When asked how much cash she had withdrawn, the press office “could not get an answer.” Silly indeed, so trivial it’s worthy only of the wretched British tabloid press, which, the French love to say, has no equivalent in France – although they relish this story. Their claws are out. They do not like Cecilia, who, I have predicted before, will be Sarkozy’s Achilles’ heel.

Other warts appearing on the fair face of Sarko’s France include: the well-sourced rumour that 17,000 jobs in education face the guillotine next year – far worse than the already much contested 10,000 proposed by the previous government; the less than happy fate of Sarkozy’s minister of higher education, whose university reform bill has already been delayed by university heads and watered down by the unions (“I gave her a job beyond her capabilities,” the furious Sarkozy is said to have stormed); and the unenviable fate of the Prime Minister, François Fillon. On Tuesday he made his first major speech setting out the government’s plans, and for his pains has been called almost every insult you can think of. Only the Figaro praised what he proposed – most other papers said he is simply spouting what Sarkozy dictates, a ventriloquist’s dummy. Even Sarkozy’s aides publicly define government policy before the PM gets a chance, perhaps before Fillon has even heard what they are. This habit, according to Le Canard Enchainé puts him in a great rage. Indeed after reading yesterday’s edition, which quotes example after example of everyone’s disregard, not to say contempt for Fillon (including Sarko’s reported and pitiless remark: “It’s up to Fillon to find his own place. I’m not going to stop saying things.”), I am firmly convinced that if he has any self-respect the man must resign before the year is out.

In a nutshell: journalists are beginning to see that things are not going according to Sarkozy’s Five Year Plan. They do not (yet) dare openly to criticise their all-powerful president, so instead they snipe mercilessly at those around him – his wife and his Prime Minister. This will doubtless continue all through the silly season (unless more editors’ heads fall) until things take a more serious turn in September.

On Friday La Croix, a daily newspaper with Catholic leanings, carried a front page editorial about competition. Competition, it said, is in some ways a good thing: “it forces companies to keep on their toes….this stimulation is good for the dynamism of the economy …….” But for the consumer, the editorial insisted, competition has its downside, for “it puts the consumer in une situation anxiogène,” that is in a state of anxiety, worry, stress and possibly depression. In other words, choice is a bad thing.

I have heard many arguments as to why competition and its ultimate corollary, ultra-libéralisme, should be avoided, but never because it causes the ordinary citizen sleepless nights worrying which product to buy. I have heard many people claim that we are descending into a nanny state, but never realised that could include being spoon-fed with a single product to spare our poor, over-stressed brain cells having to choose. The idea that some people could consider choice to be a bad thing never crossed my innocent mind, brought up as I was in the belief that the soviet experience, of being offered just one brand of soap, or one newspaper, was not only pretty depressing, but what we must strive to avoid. Apparently, given the choice, some people prefer having no choice.

The topical interest of this editorial warning against the dangers of competition, thus against freedom of choice, was that as of this Sunday, the 1st July, the dreaded ‘c’ word has entered the French energy market: the monopoly enjoyed by the two nationalised power companies, Electricité de France and Gaz de France since 1946 is ended. Following the European directive, customers can now go elsewhere for their domestic energy. But this new freedom, La Croix suggests, while stimulating the companies, will unleash a further wave of anxiety on us poor, febrile, over-stressed individuals as we thrash about trying to decide whether or not to change our electricity supplier.

True, if choice there has to be, the two nationalised leviathans have made it easier, for if you terminate your contract with them you will never again be allowed to benefit from state regulated prices. Extraordinary but true, by choosing freedom of choice you close the door on price stability. The implication being that if energy prices soar in the same way as oil prices, the state will absorb some of the increase and keep prices below market level. That is, in the French mind, what the state does, it is a shelter, protecting the citizen from the nightmare storms of the market. In addition, those who chose the roller-coaster of the free-market will be in the unscrupulous, greed-led grip of those whose sole desire is to bleed you dry for their own profit. And there will be no escape, you won’t be allowed back in the safe cocoon of the state. The choice is yours.

The sermon in La Croix warning of the dangers of competition comes just a few days after president Sarkozy fought tooth and nail to have the clause about competition removed from list of new Europe’s core objectives. Competition, Sarkozy insisted, must not be part of Europe’s fabric, thus nullifying, it seems to me, the spirit of what is called the Lisbon Strategy or Agenda of 2000, whose aim was precisely to make Europe more competitive. Sarkozy demanded that the concept of competition be dropped from Europe’s revised treaty in order to appease that majority of the French population who voted against the old Constitution two years ago. Their various objections could be refined to a single word: competition. Debilitating, anxiety-inducing, stressful competition.