Wined-up boy racers get presidential champion

Back from London, and those raucous late-night shrieks as the binge-drinking young take to the streets, I ran straight into Jean-Marie Le Pen's latest campaign pledges.

'Papa's no ami des chauffards '
Picture: mainblanche

You'll have gathered, I imagine, that while the Front National leader was given a surprisingly cushy ride by my former paper, he is not Salut!'s candidate of choice.

But what should we make of his attempt to capture the roadhog vote?

If I heard my France Info broadcast correctly this morning, the rabble-rousing old rogue of the far Right has been on his feet demanding a higher blood/alcohol limit for drivers.

He also wants to push up motorway speed limits from their present maximum of 130kph to 150kph and has a thing about speed cameras.

Having just checked on two reports of his actual words, uttered during a visit to a motor museum in Rheims, I think he was serious on both matters.

So just as France seems to be starting to get to grips with the appalling carnage on its roads, and bringing the death toll down, Le Pen offers a recipe for more danger, more crashes and presumably more deaths.

But why leave it at drink and speed? Why not make at least one bald tyre compulsory? Require no one to light up in namby-pamby fashion when it is dark or murky? And discourage insurance cover and the French version of the MoT test, the Controle Technique?

Naturally, Le Pen doesn't see it thay way. He wants a special tax on foreign lorries entering France, claiming that European freight hauliers' vehicles are involved in nine crashes in 10. And he argues that car drivers have come to be treated almost as presumed delinquents.

I am sure it cannot be that FN supporters of an especially evil bent reckon that most casualties of this tomfoolery would be of immigrant stock, and have urged their leader - innocent of such thoughts, of course - to encourage more accidents.

Indeed, Le Pen denies that his proposals would make the roads any less safe.

I'll say one thing in fainress: the French drink-driving limit is lower than the British one, so that Henri Paul was roughly twice ours but three times France's when he drove Princess Diana to his death.

But that's where the fairness ends. Let's hope that Le Pen's latest opinion roll rating - stuck on 13.5 per cent - is the one figure we can trust.