It is a sign of how badly things are going for President Sarkozy that when in mid-March Saif Gaddafi, son of the Libyan tyrant, accused Sarko of having taken his father's money to fund his 2007 election campaign, the inclination was to believe Gaddafi.
The President's men denied the allegation, and said that demands for the money to be repaid were “absurd”, on the grounds that it had never been paid over in the first place. But President Sarkozy is now in such deep doo-doo that any calumny seems plausible.
It would be the least of his present worries that the Libyan crisis gave TV stations cause to re-run old footage of him cosying up to Gaddafi not long after his triumph over Ségolène Royal four years ago. It might even turn out to be a minor problem that his UMP party has just had a kicking in the cantonal elections.
The real nightmare for Sarko is that a brace of opinion polls in early March showed him trailing behind not just Dominique Strauss-Kahn – who is yet to confirm that he plans to run for the Parti Socialiste nomination this autumn – but also behind Marine Le Pen, the new leader of the Front National.
This may have been a shock to Sarko, but it will not have shocked readers of this publication, for I wrote about Ms Le Pen's particular threat to the President a couple
of months ago.
Mr Sarkozy has been the author of his own misfortune. In political terms he has disappointed catastrophically. He came to power in 2007 promising a break with the corrupt, under-achieving regimes that had characterised the Fifth Republic since the death of Pompidou. He hired Jacques Attali to draw up a list of reforms, and Mr Attali produced a list of 316 of them.
Little more has been heard of them: Mr Sarkozy's attempt to reform the provision of taxi services in Paris (one of Mr Attali's suggestions) was abandoned when the taxi drivers went on strike and paralysed the capital. As a result, Paris still has the same number of taxi licences it had in 1923.
This sort of thing exemplifies the level of vested interest that remains unchallenged as we approach the fifth year of Mr Sarkozy's rule, and why so many French voters have had enough of him.
But it is not just his political problems that have caused his unpopularity. He is regarded as vulgar, shifty and lacking in judgment. There has been a toning-down of the bling-bling aspect of Sarkoisme, a suggestion that the President is alert to the damage his own behaviour has done to his reputation.
But many natural UMP supporters see him as an embarrassment and are looking elsewhere; hence the rise in support for the Front National.
And, as Ms Le Pen showed on her visit to Lampedusa in mid-March, there is still plenty of political mileage in playing the immigration card. Ms Le Pen has been shrewd to
avoid the overtly racist talk that characterised her party under the rule of her father, and she has learnt to make a distinction between sheer numbers of immigrants and their ethnic origins.
The French electorate feel that President Sarkozy has simply failed to address the issue at all: though an attempt by him to have citizenship withdrawn from immigrants
who attack police officers failed a few weeks ago. It smacked of panic and seemed botched from the word go; it was another sign that he is losing his grip.
Then there was the reshuffle, used largely to rid him of the embarrassment of Michèle Alliot-Marie, whose interesting holiday activities I described here a month ago.
The return to high office of Alain Juppé brought back into the government a man with a rare track record of success, both nationally and locally: the reincarnation of Bordeaux from a run-down port to one of the best-functioning and most handsome cities in Europe was largely his achievement.
However, Mr Juppé is also a man with a conviction for political corruption who was banned from holding public office for a time. It has the smell of a football team that brings a star player out of retirement for one more game, and is equally desperate.
If Mr Sarkozy's fortunes do not revive, the prospect of a third place in next year's election is clearly in view for him. It is the fate that befell Lionel Jospin in 2002,
when the Socialists put up such a dismal performance in the first round that it allowed a run-off between Jacques Chirac and Le Pen père.
Mr Chirac won that by a landslide. But what would be the outcome be if the two candidates were of the Left and the ultraconservative Right? What would UMP voters feel they should do with their votes in the second round if they no longer had a candidate to vote for?
Mr Strauss-Kahn does such a good impression of a conservative, especially since his spell at the IMF taught him about the beauty of free markets, that they might vote for him: but it is precisely because he seems so conservative that he may not win his party's primaries, and gain the nomination.
A contest between a moderate FN candidate such as Marine Le Pen and an old-style socialist such as Martine Aubry would not be one a wise person would bet the house on.
Perhaps Sarko will pull something out of the fire. It is another 12 months before the first round. But France remains sclerotic in its economy, overregulated in its commerce and fears losing its national identity. He has not shown himself equal to those challenges in four years. How can anyone be sure that he will suddenly find the way forward in the coming one?
