Those who wondered how President Sarkozy would handle the potential embarrassment of having a wife who refuses to live at the Elysée Palace and who is often seen in the company of other men, now have their answer: turn her into a trouble-shooting diplomat.



In a controversial departure from the tradition that French presidential wives should be seen and not heard, Cécilia Sarkozy was twice dispatched by her husband on a diplomatic mission to Tripoli. Her task, and triumph, was to free five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, jailed eight years previously for allegedly infecting hundreds of children with HIV, in what has been widely seen as a miscarriage of justice.

The cynics were convinced that the President had already received private assurances from his opposite number in Libya, Colonel Gadaffi, just ahead of a French state visit to Tripoli, and that it was all a put-up job designed to flatter the ego of his recalcitrant wife. They pointed out that the European Union had been in patient negotiations with Libya over the matter for a number of years and that Gadaffi had already shown, in his dealings with Britain over the Lockerbie terrorists, a willingness to cooperate to restore his country’s reputation on the international stage.

 

However, Sarkozy responded effectively to his carping critics from the French left wing by quoting what one of the Bulgarian nurses had said to him when she flew home to freedom on the French presidential jet. ‘She told me it was the happiest day of my life’, he told a television reporter, ‘Not, and what exactly is the status of your wife?’

 

Whether Cécilia can be brought so easily back into the fold remains much less certain. At the recent G8 summit in Germany, she abandoned the delegates 24 hours after the start of the event and flew back to Paris for her daughter’s twentieth birthday party.