Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Beware: Suits can seriously damage your health

In the early summer you couldn’t move in France for giant pictures of men in suits and women in more suits. This was because we were having a presidential election. Should Sarko survive? Or would hot-tip Hollande hustle his way in? Did anybody care?

A rogues’ gallery des cons en costumes even festooned the Mairie wall at Fa. They claimed to be of different flavours; left, right, centre, green, far-right, far-left, off the planet etc, but were all exactly the same: i.e. bureaucrats.

The only one that caught my eyes was the green candidate, advertising her two major rallies; one is in Paris, the other in Grenoble. Being it's quicker to fly to the UK than to get to either place from here, I ask myself: what on earth has this got to do with us? Alternatively, should you be an ardent green intent wasting all that fossil fuel to attend your rallies, how would you live with yourself afterwards?

The biggest drawback with British politics is having to vote for a politician. In France the problem is being stuck with an un-choice of ten bureaucrats. Not one of them understands that all ordinary people want is less paper and more jobs. If any of them do, none of them is in the slightest way capable of achieving it.

Most people I know said they had no-one to vote for. An underwhelmed nation yawned . . .

In the event Le Grand Suitissimmo himself, self-styled Monsieur Normale, François Hollande won. This was with hindsight inevitable, as the already forgotten Nicolas Sarkozy pretty much had to lose, having promised absolument everything to absolument everybody whilst delivering on about2% of it.

Actually Hollande isn’t quite as normale as he makes out. For a start his full moniker is François Gérard Georges Nicolas Hollande, which even gives Charles Philip Arthur George a run for his money, and strikes me as being just un peu pretentieux for any genuine homme du gauche . . . bet the Hollande family didn’t go sans culottes when he was a lad.

In addition to being is the 24th President of France, I’m intrigued to find that he is also ex-officio Co-Prince of Andorra. So perhaps his dear old père knew what he was doing when he lined the boy François up with all those names.

Having become Le Prés, Hollande and les Socialistes then went on to gain an absolute majority in the legislative elections, accompanied naturally by lots more giant pictures of men in suits and women in more suits. These days the two elections are run one straight after other in France, which does have the potentially intelligent effect of having Président and legislature both on the same side, politically-speaking.

In this case, the boy François has carte blanche to wipe such modest achievements as Nicolas Sarkozy may truthfully lay claim to, straight off the face of la belle France, and indeed he is rapidly doing so, even as we speak. In some ways it’s a bit of a shame; Sarkozy did understand the need to bring the French economy kicking and screaming into possibly even the 19th century. He just didn’t do anything about it.

So then, Sarko, where did it all go wrong? Well son . . . you really mustn’t make all those promises without fulfilling at least a few of them.

You really shouldn’t abolish (as promised) an unfair tax on the millions of self-employed who voted you in, and instantly replace it with another unfair tax of exactly the same amount.

It wasn’t too bright to try to give your son a seriously cushy top industry post, when his only qualification was being related to you. Even le petit Sarko twigged this one and refused the job, realising it would reduce any shred of cred he may have possessed to zéro.

And of course the hot wife card never played quite right. Personally I’m a big fan of la belle Michelle, intelligent, well-informed, derrière délectable, loved by all and frankly one of Obama’s biggest assets. Madame Carla on the other hand just made Sarko look over-privileged, even if it was mostly her dosh. Tant pis, c’est fini. Comment te dire adieu?