Sarkozy said recently: "Cowardice is a sickness which you can't cure and gets worse as you get older." President Chirac is 73 in November.In other words, just over a month after the French people rejected politics as usual, we have (guess what) politics as usual: ambition, personal calculation, vicious struggles for position between supposedly allied politicians Well, not quite, say M Sarkozy's supporters and admirers. de Villepin was interior minister, into alleged secret Sarkozy bank accounts in Luxembourg.Let us pause for a moment and gaze in wonder at politics in the French style. The Tony vs Gordon show looks, in comparison, like Punch and Judy.Nicolas Sarkozy, the number three in the present pecking order of the French republic, is investigating semi-publicly alleged attempts to smear him by the Number One (M Chirac) and the Number Two (M de Villepin).M. de Villepin.The first witch-hunt concerns the rumours about the Sarkozy marriage. The second concerns a bogus investigation, conducted while M.

Paris-Match says he has given himself 100 days - ie, until September - to reconquer his wife.M. Sarkozy privately blames "the Chirac clan" for first circulating the rumours that his marriage was on the rocks just before the EU referendum vote Since returning to the interior ministry a month ago, M. Swiss and Belgian newspapers have been more detailed and direct but any newspaper which circulates in France - such as The Independent - is subject to the French privacy law. We must also, therefore, talk in mealy-mouthed codes.Mme Sarkozy, of whom more later, spent a weekend in Jordan at the same time as a senior PR executive The pair are said to be close friends M Sarkozy has admitted to "difficulties in our marriage".

Sarkozy, pugnacious as ever, complained later that this was a "quasi-fascist" remark.) The rumours - and partially confirmed reality - of cracks in M. Sarkozy's power marriage have given his enemies, in his own camp and outside, a smell of blood. A man who had seemed untouchable - capable of straddling the normal left-right fault lines of French politics, untainted by scandal, married to a woman who was also the head of his private office - was vulnerable after all The state of relations between M. Sarkozy and his wife is unclear, partly because the tough French laws on privacy oblige the French press to talk in mealy-mouthed codes. The centre-left news magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, asked on its front cover: "Sarkozy: populist drift or nervous breakdown?" The unctuous and needling socialist politician Arnaud Montebourg referred in the National Assembly to M Sarkozy's "fragile state of mind" (M.