FRANCE HAS long defended politicians’ right to keep their bedroom antics out of the public eye. But this week marks a landmark in the debate over whether MPs’ libidos are the nation’s business.
For the first time, a serving minister is the subject of an exposé by his ex-wife, telling all about his infidelity, mid-life crisis and running off with a younger woman.
But, rather than fighting it in court, Eric Besson, a favourite of Nicolas Sarkozy, has privately encouraged the book.
Mr Besson (51), who runs Mr Sarkozy’s new ministry of immigration and national identity, has been tipped to become the next prime minister. A former socialist who jumped ship during the presidential election, he was once dubbed “the Traitor”. Now facing controversy over his decision to bulldoze a migrant squatter camp in Calais, Mr Besson has been called the presidential “darling”.
But his ex-wife Sylvie Brunel (49), a geographer and former head of the charity Action Against Hunger, in Guerrilla Handbook for Women due to be published on Wednesday, says Besson was an insatiable cheat with serial, “interchangeable mistresses”.
At their wedding in 1983, when the mayor began reciting the vows of “fidelity, aid and support”, Besson interjected: “Fidelity, no”. A “humiliated” Brunel convinced the concerned mayor it was a joke. Then moments after finishing his starter at the wedding meal, Besson disappeared to watch motor-racing on TV.
She said he was unfaithful for five years before their marriage and 25 years afterwards, adding: “I can’t say I wasn’t warned.”
Shortly after leaving the Socialists to join Sarkozy, Mr Besson left his wife for a woman “almost as young as our eldest daughter” and who “oozed narcissism from every pore of her pretty skin”.
When Mr Besson read the manuscript, he decided he was powerless to oppose the book and even recommended it to his own publisher. Publicly he will not comment, but French journalists say that privately he is revelling in the attention. – (Guardian service)