Is Carla Bruni-Sarkozy really pregnant? The speculation had been rife
for weeks but now it has been confirmed in an apparently unauthorised
disclosure from her father-in-law to, er, Europe's most read daily,
Bild. There has been no comment from the Élysée Palace, anxious it's
said, not to look as if they're making political capital from their
private lives. As if. How cynical of pollsters to start calculating the
impact on the beleaguered president's re-election chances.
It is not yet clear whether the winning formula that is in danger of becoming part of received political wisdom here (party leader + paternity = poll success) – will work across the Channel. Bruni-Sarkozy do not represent the sun-blessed perfection of Britain's "first fathers" (Blair, Brown and Cameron, in case the roll call has slipped your mind). Sarko is a 56-year-old grandfather and Bruni has two teenage children from her former marriage. Bruni has more of a superstar image in the UK – where just by being French or coming to us from France, she is licensed to make all women feel frumpy – than she does at home.
But the marriage has always seemed to sceptical observers (such as me) an exercise in vanity which leaves only the most credulous supposing the pregnancy is a happy accident. This looks scarily like another triumph for the hollowed-out politics where personality and personal appeal are a substitute for any pretence of a contest of political ideas. And they do it because it seems to work. Paternity is both the ultimate triumph of the macho and the stage on which the politician can legitimately perform the father-protector role. It is an artifice that conceals the less saleable truth: that politics is a question of the ruthless exercise of power. Family authenticates humanity.
It seems not to matter that this kind of patriarchal setup is itself partly a nostalgic myth, one of those misty-eyed constructs that was never quite true but exists as a kind of reproach for contemporary failure. The arrival of the political pregnancy reflects another development: the terrifying role that families are coming to play in the crucifying world of status, where a child's success is appropriated by the tiger mother (or father), where children are props to their parents' self-esteem and where, in a scary revisiting of another aspect of 1950s life, a stay-at-home wife is a tribute to her husband's earning power.
The less politics is about public affairs, the more it is about private ones. Sarkozy, presiding over devastating youth unemployment, and savage cuts in pensions, can only be delighted that his lovely trophy wife is to produce a lovely trophy baby in time for his bid for a second term. And as for the Icarus-like descent of his principle presidential rival – surely he could not even have dreamed that Dominique Strauss-Kahn would be alleged to be a sex fiend just as he himself was reinvented as a family man?
It is not yet clear whether the winning formula that is in danger of becoming part of received political wisdom here (party leader + paternity = poll success) – will work across the Channel. Bruni-Sarkozy do not represent the sun-blessed perfection of Britain's "first fathers" (Blair, Brown and Cameron, in case the roll call has slipped your mind). Sarko is a 56-year-old grandfather and Bruni has two teenage children from her former marriage. Bruni has more of a superstar image in the UK – where just by being French or coming to us from France, she is licensed to make all women feel frumpy – than she does at home.
But the marriage has always seemed to sceptical observers (such as me) an exercise in vanity which leaves only the most credulous supposing the pregnancy is a happy accident. This looks scarily like another triumph for the hollowed-out politics where personality and personal appeal are a substitute for any pretence of a contest of political ideas. And they do it because it seems to work. Paternity is both the ultimate triumph of the macho and the stage on which the politician can legitimately perform the father-protector role. It is an artifice that conceals the less saleable truth: that politics is a question of the ruthless exercise of power. Family authenticates humanity.
It seems not to matter that this kind of patriarchal setup is itself partly a nostalgic myth, one of those misty-eyed constructs that was never quite true but exists as a kind of reproach for contemporary failure. The arrival of the political pregnancy reflects another development: the terrifying role that families are coming to play in the crucifying world of status, where a child's success is appropriated by the tiger mother (or father), where children are props to their parents' self-esteem and where, in a scary revisiting of another aspect of 1950s life, a stay-at-home wife is a tribute to her husband's earning power.
The less politics is about public affairs, the more it is about private ones. Sarkozy, presiding over devastating youth unemployment, and savage cuts in pensions, can only be delighted that his lovely trophy wife is to produce a lovely trophy baby in time for his bid for a second term. And as for the Icarus-like descent of his principle presidential rival – surely he could not even have dreamed that Dominique Strauss-Kahn would be alleged to be a sex fiend just as he himself was reinvented as a family man?