Something About Us*

Let's be honest two people turning up at an anonymous Paris address on a moped wearing crash helmets doesn't look out of place does it? But when you learn that one of those people is the French President Francois Hollande and that what you are looking at is a photograph appearing in a French magazine then things start to take on a potentially different scenario.

The French generally shrug their shoulders and get back to the more important things in life when presented with the revelation that one of their politicians has been caught 'sans culotte'  but those revelations aren't generally accompanied by a photograph and coverage on national and international television. I can't remember a time when BBC and Sky news reporters took to the streets of the French capital and walked the short route from the Elysee Palance to the address of the Presidents mistress.

It's not the affair that matters, nor do the revelations on their own after all there is nothing to say that public and private lives cannot be maintained separately from each other but it's surely the potential security issue that is the problem here.

The head of one of Western Europes largest countries, a NATO member, G-20 member and the person beneath whose index finger the launching of France's nuclear weapons depends upon has been photographed arriving for "une nuit sous les couvertures" by a paparazzi.

Whether or not the magazine 'Closer', remember them from last year and the Kate Middleton long lens photographs, was right in publishing the story is down to their readership, where they were clearly wrong in my opinion is the use of photographs to illustrate the story. Stories do not need photographic embellishments, nor do they need details of a lone security man arriving each morning with a bag of croissants to persuade somebody who has no interest in affairs of the heart to pitch up one night, sit in a car and take a pot shot at the President.

If, as we are led to believe, tired, depressed and unhappy then perhaps he should resign from office rather than putting himself in the firing line. After all unlike Kate Middleton in her birthday suit any potential attack here would be up close and personal, after all the whole world now knows where Julie Gayet lives and that those two figures arriving at night on a moped aren't Daft Punk putting in some remixing time on the next album.  

Hollande and his bodyguard should have gone for this look

* Daft Punk track from their second album 'Discovery'