Nicolas Sarkozy, we're told, is spending £10,000 a day on food and drink. That's quite a sum, even by the notoriously self-indulgent standards of French presidents. How does he do it?
Sarkozy's regal lifestyle at the taxpayers' expense has been revealed by Ren Dosire, a Socialist MP who specialises in exposing government waste. In a new book, Dosire accuses "Sarko" of a spending spree unparalleled in French presidential history. The Sarkozy Elyse, for example, operates 121 cars (compared to 55 under the previous president, Jacques Chirac), which costs £100,000 a year in insurance alone, and another £275,000 in fuel costs.
And while to appease the masses, as Matthew Campbell notes in The Sunday Times, Sarkozy did cancel his annual garden party after revelations that it cost £500,000, he has shown no interest in trimming the Elyse travel budget.
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Since the start of his presidency, he has averaged 24 hours a week in the air on colossally expensive overseas trips, most of them made aboard the Airbus A330, which he had kitted out in 2008 to his own exacting specifications at a cost of £215m. Just to install a more sophisticated oven and put electric blinds on the portholes cost £900,000, complains Dosire.
Sarkozy's lifestyle makes the Queen look quaintly modest by comparison. I can't imagine Her Majesty allowing the Palace to spend £10,000 a day on food and drink. But no expense is spared to please the historians, business leaders and political pundits who visit the Elyse for lunch; they enjoy, as a "house" white, a 1995 Pouilly Fum, while the red is a 2006 Crozes-Hermitage at £160 a bottle.
What makes this extravagance even odder is that Sarko himself is teetotal; nor, says Matthew Campbell, is he much interested in food, such as the lobster carpaccio or calves' cheeks with gnocchi that are served at his table. "The president feeds on words," says Dosire. "Mainly his own."
A perfect bathroom
Asked which is the best bathroom he's ever been in, the FT's "agony uncle", David Tang, singles out one in the Hotel Feltrinelli it is part of a presidential suite (there are two) with a shower that looks out over Lake Garda. The bathroom was commissioned by Bob Burns, "the greatest hotelier today".
Tang says that the problem with modern architects is that they make bathrooms too small. Yet we're "at our most relaxed" in bathrooms and need space. He would "dispense with the statutory marble on the wall and on the floor" (now "boringly de rigueur"). He wants to be surrounded by "soft things" and prefers a proper carpet.
He wants bookshelves, paintings with picture lights, and a table by the bath to hold his Roberts radio and an ashtray for his Havana cigar. Nor would he have ceiling lights, "which make us look uglier than we might already be", but "sconces and stand-lamps". He wants a drinks tray, too, with "beautiful old cut glasses and decanters, and a glass ice-bucket" so he can enjoy a "decent whisky" in the bathroom. A man after my own heart.
Tabloid money "I don't feel warm inside, I feel spiteful and malevolent"
"Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell wants Britain to send millions in aid to Somalia before the region destabilises further and we end up having to send in our troops at a cost of billions," says Jane Moore in The Sun. Mitchell argues that there are more British passport holders engaged in terrorist training in Somalia than in any other part of the world. "Gulp. Begging the question: If they know that, then why the hell aren't we sending in the SAS to deal with them rather than whinnying on about giving yet more aid we can ill afford?"
The current crisis in car insurance is typical of everything that's wrong with modern Britain, says The Mail on Sunday. "Feeding off the disastrous decision to permit no-win, no-fee lawsuits, unscrupulous lawyers have made an industry out of dubious injury claims." Meanwhile, gutless insurance companies have played along, "reasoning that it is easier to squeeze their customers than to fight these cases through the courts".
As a result car insurance "has grown impossibly expensive for the safe and law-abiding". The Transport Secretary is right to take on this "nasty problem", but she will need the backing of the whole government to defeat the vested interests and lobbyists that "got us into this mess in the first place".
"The Indians are the latest to show Britain how grateful they are for the one billion quid aid they receive from us each year," says Rod Liddle in The Sun. "They've awarded a huge contract worth £13bn for fighter jets to France instead of us, despite the fact that France scarcely bunged them the price of the Tube fare home.
"I realise India needs to buy the best possible fighter jets it can, so that they go about the important work of bombing Pakistan." Foreign aid may be meant to make us all feel warm inside. "But I don't feel warm inside, I feel spiteful and malevolent."
