One of the best reasons for a Briton to live in France is that you escape from the horror of the corrupt, dishonest and generally depraved politicians of England.
However, it soon becomes apparent that you have, instead, to live with the horror of the corrupt, dishonest and generally depraved politicians of France. This might be more bearable because one does not usually, as an immigrant, have quite the same level of emotional commitment to one's adopted country as one is forced to have with "home". However, the moment one starts paying French taxes, you realise that you are all in the same boat.
Much that we have experienced in British politics helped prepare us for last month's little local difficulty for Michèle Alliot-Marie, the foreign minister. MAM, as the French papers so conveniently term her, comes over in her media appearances as a rather hard-faced killer granny, her piercing eyes diffracted only slightly by her ascetic wire spectacles.
Once President Sarkozy's attempt to form a government of all the talents died the death last autumn, and the lefty Bernard Kouchner departed from the Quai d'Orsay, MAM replaced him. She had been an efficient defence minister rather than a spectacularly brilliant one, but her loyalty to Sarko through difficult times was deemed to merit a reward. A period of her career spent in even sunnier climes than France beckoned.
However, MAM doesn't just like the sun when she's on business. She likes it on her hols as well, as we all do. However, she was fortunate enough to have a rich pal, Azid Miled, with a private jet in Tunisia who could ferry her around without the tiresomeness of her having to pig it on public transport; and MAM saw no reason not to avail herself of his hospitality during her New Year holiday. Mr Miled, however, happens to have been a close associate of Tunisia's deposed and venal president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and a man whose name appears on a list of those subject to an assets freeze in Switzerland.
Worse, MAM (who went with her boyfriend Patrick Ollier, a fellow minister whose day-job is to manage relations between the administration and the National Assembly) decided to go on her Tunisian jaunt while the country was in uproar and some protesters were being killed in the demonstrations there.
When all this was exposed by Le Canard Enchainé, MAM's response was to start prevaricating, as politicians do. Mr Miled had not lent them his jet, she said: they had merely hitched a ride with him, as one does. She also said that she wasn't foreign minister when she was on holiday, a remark that caused such outrage that she was forced into a spectacularly grovelling apology within 24 hours.
It is almost not worthy of notice that she also offered to have the French train some Tunisian security forces in dealing with restive locals, and that the day before the discredited regime was booted out of office a new consignment of tear gas grenades arrived from France, to keep any uppity types in order.
However, no sooner had MAM grovelled than another holiday embarrassment dumped itself on the government. The genial and usually rather adept Prime Minister, François Fillon, a man far more popular than his boss the President, was shown to have holidayed in Egypt with his family over the New Year period at the expense of the unlamented ex-President Mubarak, or rather, given the kleptocratic habits of Mubarak, the Egyptian people. Mr Fillon thought better of it than to say that he stopped being prime minister when he was on holiday: but he admitted he had taken this rather unwise freebie (which included staying at Aswan and being flown around on Mubarak's own jet) only when warned that Le Canard was preparing to out him.
Mr Fillon might also have said that other democratic leaders had flown Air Mubarak in the past, notably Tony Blair, whose 2001 Christmas family holiday had been to Egypt courtesy of the Egyptian taxpayer. That caused controversy at the time, and Mr Blair said he had made donations to a charity chosen by his hosts.
Yet however bad that was, it was not perceived to be so bad as what Mr Fillon and MAM have just done. Those were years of plenty, not of austerity; there was not the awareness of politicians being quite so on the take as there is now; and North Africa was not simmering with potential revolution. Also, senior politicians have always taken hospitality from rich people: even such paragons as Churchill. But times have changed.
Sarko, who sacked one minister last year for having the French taxpayer pick up his cigar bill and another for running up a €116,500 bill for a private jet to take him to Martinique, could not remain silent. As well as having his staff co-ordinate the grovelling of two of his most senior colleagues, he told his administration to take their holidays in France in future.
This seemed to take things to another extreme: there can surely be nothing wrong with politicians going wherever they want provided they pay for it themselves, and there is no guarantee that they won't end up in some fabulous bolthole on the Riviera or in the Alps with someone else picking up the tab. It is also hard on someone like Mr Fillon, whose wife is Welsh and who has family outside France as a result.
But the reaction suggests panic at the perception of a gulf between the sensibilities of the French electorate and the conduct of those who rule them. A president who put the phrase "bling bling" into the political lexicon is an odd man to impose such strictures. But with the first round of the presidential elections a little over a year away, the time for ostentatious good behaviour is manifestly upon us.
Simon Heffer is associate editor of The Daily Telegraph
