PM Villepin on the Ropes?

This weekend's Financial Times has a good piece on France's poetaster fop Prime Minister which is pay-per-view and suitably disrespectful.

But the most massive dissing of a French official comes from Oxford Chancellor [and former EU potentate] Chris Patten who reviews a book on China by James Kynge, China Shakes The World, which I reviewed a fortnight back on evidently worth the price of a few bucks judging from Kynge's descriptions of China's Latest Greatest Leap Forward. Patten, apropos of western economic nationalism, gets the giant dig in at PM de Villepin's master/mentor

Jacques Chirac, the French President, always a good weathervane of the most ignorant forms of populist protectionism, has already moved from expressions of "brotherly love" for China to assaults on the import of Chinese bras, though he does not try to justify this by any expressed concern for, say, human rights.

I'm sure that Chirac's catamite PM will feel the same way when WackoJacque-o ditches him once the street tumult in Paris gets on the crotchety old Prez's nerves. De Villepin got a temporary reprieve, but the CGT smells [lizard] blood and is employing its kiddie corps of student-rads to keep the heat on the feet of the elite!

Oh so soon, Chirac will predictably jettison his chosen successor to demonstrate further, if any proof were needed, that his backbone has gone the way of his moral courage, long sacrificed to la gloire de lui-meme. As De Gaulle would have said of this faux Sun King, "le chienlit, c'est lui!"