Sarkozy favourite replaces France's top news presenter

By John Lichfield in Paris
Tuesday, 10 June 2008

REUTERS

France's most popular television news presenter, Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, will be dumped this summer in favour of a rising female star who was once linked romantically with President Nicolas Sarkozy.

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A deputy in M. Sarkozy's party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) suggested the changes on the TF1 show were driven by "psychology", not friendship, politics or pique.

Poivre d'Arvor was closely associated with the era of the presidents François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, the deputy said. "So long as PPDA was on the news each night, you had the impression that nothing in France had really changed. President Sarkozy is determined that everything should seem to have changed."

In December 1991, Poivre d'Arvor was caught out faking an interview with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Shots of "PPDA" asking questions were inter-cut with Mr Castro's replies at an open press conference. In 1996, he was found guilty of taking benefits in kind from a businessman whose father-in-law, a rising politician, had been a regular guest on his news show. Poivre d'Arvor was given a suspended jail sentence and asked to stand down from his job for a year.

Ferrari used to be the back-up presenter of the TF1 news at the weekend. She left two years ago after her then husband, Thomas Hugues, was fired from his post as back-up presenter to "PPDA" on weekdays. That decision was taken – again through the influence of M. Sarkozy – to create a vacancy for a black journalist, Harry Roselmack, to occupy a high-profile position on French TV for the first time.

The main weekend presenter, Claire Chazal, mother of an illegitimate son with Poivre d'Arvor, was also reported recently to have lost favour with the TF1 management. She is now expected to continue in her post

Ferrari parted from her husband last autumn. Soon afterwards, she was reported by French magazines and blogs to have been a frequent dinner guest at the Elysée Palace, in the weeks following M. Sarkozy's divorce from his second wife, Cécilia.

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Gus: blah blah blah...

The French are different from you and me.

Yes, they have Sarkozy.

And they have Carla.

And they have “the Carla effect,” as it’s known in Paris.

If an American first lady, or would-be first lady, described herself as a “tamer of men” and had a “man-eating” past filled with naked pictures, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, sultry prone CD covers, breaking up marriages, bragging that she believes in polygamy and polyandry rather than monogamy, and having a son with a married philosopher whose father she had had an affair with, it would take more than an appearance on “The View” to sweeten her image.

It’s hard to imagine the decibel level on Fox News if Michelle Obama put out a CD this summer, as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is, with songs featuring lyrics like “I am a child/despite my 40 years/despite my 30 lovers/a child”; and this song, “Ma came”: “You are my junk/more deadly than Afghan heroin/more dangerous than Colombian white. .../My guy, I roll him up and smoke him.”

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Gus: camelotte?... For those who don't understand Froggy, the word means "things badly made" or of poor quality... it also means "song sheets for songs sung at street-corners" and also some sheets for dubious adversing for cheap goods... "came" by the way is short slang for camelotte and means "drugs" in Franco-slang.

Napoleonic epic...