Competition (4): tension mounts

Just one day and a bit to go, as I am reminded by the arrival of a brand new copy, albeit slightly battered in the post, of one of the prizes.

You still have between now and teatime today - 6pm French time - to e-mail the name of the ungovernable French cat, and/or a copy of the Salut! home page capturing the moment we passed 50,000 hits last week, to colinrandall2001@yahoo.fr



No disadvantage applies to anyone who is late in supplying the right answer. You could even be last and win.

If you haven't been paying attention, and wish to enter, a simple search of Salut! or a less simple one of my old Telegraph blog (since it is hidden away in the Telegraph site's sinbin) should lead to the cat's identity.

As for the picture, it is election time in France and she may or may not be making a political statement with her choice of colour, or making the natural response to much of the debate in a somewhat drab campaign.

An announcement as to prize winners will appear here as soon after that time as possible and in any event by tomorrow morning.

Polls built from straw?

parisdailyphoto

Each time the temptation arises to be sniffy about opinion polls, I take care to remind myself that in a past life, I had regular dealings with pollsters.

Once a month, Anthony King, gentleman, scholar and highly entertaining company, would call at the Telegraph offices in Canary Wharf with a couple of executives from YouGov to discuss future polls.

Guests and assorted hacks alike would be offered champagne on arrival for lunch, and good wine was then served in reasonable though hardly excessive quantities throughout the convivial meal that invariably followed. Ideas would be tossed around until some firm plan evolved.

In an austere new world, a stop was soon put to the champagne and wine, of course, though I am glad to say that Britain and I had parted company by then.

The conviviality, I am sure, survived the prissy change and the lunches will doubtless have remained as businesslike and productive as before, though I am prepared to bet they are not more so.

Professor King - or better, Tony - takes a highly methodical approach to his preparation of polls, and the analysis of their findings.

Viewers will know all about that if they have tuned in on election night and seen him assessing the exit polls and early declarations from places like Sunderland South (honest - they're always first or nearly first) and Billericay.

With his photographic memory and grasp of detail, Tony is a sort of Canadian Leslie Welch of politics and psephology.

He was a great fan of YouGov, which conducts its surveys via the internet.

I was always a little less convinced by this method of monitoring public opinion; the cyber age was not at that point so firmly established as it is now and whole swathes of voters were necessarily excluded.

When I suggested a poll of British Muslim attitudes on such issues as citizenship, loyalty and terrorism in the aftermath to Sept 11 and military action in Afghanistan, the problems of creating a viable sample very nearly proved fatal to the exercise.

In the event, the YouGov findings - though based on a sample as low as it could get before the level at which Tony would have advised against going ahead - mirrored those of subsequent polls on the same subject carried out by more conventional means and with many more respondents.

Pollsters know the science of their métier, and will usually argue that it gives a very reasonable prospect of an accurate reflection of public opinion.

But in the case of my Muslim poll, I felt very strongly at the time that the most valuable part of the project was the work of two reporters of Asian background who were sent off to canvass views in towns with large Muslim populations.

One of them turned in a weighty tome running to thousands of words which I had to whittle down to a few hundred. Useful as his research was in shaping our coverage, I remember hoping that he would find a home for an uncut version of his extraordinarily detailed epic.

My doubts about polls do not end with the internet since there are other ways in which the process of choosing a sample is flawed, a view reinforced by a small article seen in Le Canard Enchainé on the train from Toulon to Paris (a visit that may explain my silence here since Monday).

If the old Chained Duck is to be believed, and often it can, French polling institutions routinely exclude 31 per cent of the French from their telephone surveys, for the simple reason that those taking part are selected from listed, fixed-line subscribers.

Yet there is an army of people out there that has no phones of any kind, makes all or virtually all its calls on mobiles or uses internet phone services such as Skype. Young voters and people on modest incomes are said to be particularly likely to fall into one of these categories.

Add to that the obvious fact that not everyone likes being bothered by cold callers - and as many as 30 per cent refuse to take part - and you begin to see the fault lines developing.

The margin of error surely gets wider if you take account of such drawbacks, and there are at least three other complications affecting the French presidential elections:
* large numbers of apparently undecided voters
* the emergence of a strong third contender (Le Pen in 2002, Bayrou this time)
* the exclusion of French citizens - 2.3 million of them - living in the Dom-Toms, overseas departments and territories.

Does it matter? Well, yes it does. I see weight to the argument that polls have an ability to shape - in other words distort - the public view, or to encourage tactical voting that might not otherwise have occurred.

It is just as well, as I said in a piece at the Guardian Comment Is Free site, that France bans opinion polls in the last week of campaigning.

But, repeating from that item what I take to be the logical follow-up question, would it not make the democratic process a shade more democratic if we were to impose a much longer ban?

We are within six weeks of the first round of the presidential elections, and François Bayrou's success as Third Way candidate is inspiring all sorts of mathematical as well as political calculation.

How much healthier it would seem if we knew there wouldn't be another poll from a week on Saturday until the real votes were cast on April 22.

Ségo: it's tough being a woman

However you look at it, Ségolène Royal's television audience - a peak of just under 10.6 million viewers, an average of 8.9 million - proves she is a remarkable draw.

Picture: François Lafite

The average was comfortably higher than the ratings for her rival Nicolas Sarkozy's similar broadcast, itself described as a record for a political programme in France, two weeks ago.

Many people will have tuned in expecting, a lot of them hoping, to see Ségo stumble and fall. But she will take huge comfort from the figures, believing the massive penetration will help her rise above media, opposition and even Left Bank intellectual disdain.

Some will remember mention here of her steeliness and ambition being seen as faults, whereas in a man they'd be hailed as virtues.

This notion surfaced again the other day when she reacted sharply to questions about the abrupt resignation, allegedly over funding of her programme, of an economic adviser.

It was certainly an eyebrow-raising moment, and poor PR, but the writer of one column I saw couldn't resist adding that she was too quick to reveal herself as hard. Sarko seems to get off much more lightly when he makes ill-considered ripostes.

Last night, she argued that running for the presidency was harder for a woman, that no man would have had his competence questioned as constantly as has happened to her.

It was a long programme but I felt Royal did reasonably well after a ponderous start (not her fault; the first questioner was allowed to ramble for ever).

She made the right noises (for the left, so to speak) on youth unemployment, pensions, small businesses and the disabled. And she refused to be wrong-footed by questions about the Parti Socialiste "elephants", not least what role if any she would hand as President Royal to her partner François Hollande, the general secretary.

The moment when she walked over to console a wheelchair-bound man, in tears as he described living with MS, could have been embarrassing but wasn't. It looked a genuine gesture, but I suspect it will also have done her no harm.

I found her a little less assured on the presidency itself - "I think I am ready" hardly had the ring of confidence - and on that thorny issue of how she will pay for her programme. But Sarko has unanswered questions in that area, too.

François Bayrou, the centrist candidate who has been steadily improving his showing in the polls, is an interesting sideshow. I simply do not believe the poll that found he would beat either Ségo or Sarko if he made it through to the second round, but he is capable of inflicting damage, especially on her.

Royal's best bet, provided she can finally sort out her unimpressive campaign team, is that those 10.59 million viewers - isn't that 10,589,000 more than are canvassed in the average poll? - liked not only what they saw, which is usually the case, but what they heard, too.

Turmoil in the Royal household

The best thing that Ségolène Royal can say about this week is that she chose a good week to have a bad week.

Good, in the sense that the days following the installation of Nicolas Sarkozy as her chief rival were always going to belong to him, barring some public relations debacle.

Bad, in the sense that exactly such a PR nightmare has beset the Parti Socialiste camp.

Picture: e-diote.

Mme Royal did manage to turn to her eventual advantage one tax issue - her own eligibility for France's notorious wealth tax, with a tendency to hit people who are not wealthy at all that Richard of Orléans has used this blog to explain well.

She gave figures, spoke of transparency and made it look as if disreputable people from Sarko's centre-Right UMP party had been engaged in dirty tricks about her private affairs in an attempt to smear her.

Actually, she used that word racaille that got Sarko into trouble at the start of the 2005 French riots.

The BBC went for the harshest definitions - thugs, scum, filth - which rather overlooked the fact that the word can also mean rabble and is commonly used as such by parents to children and children to other children.

All that matters, of course, is how the target of the term takes it and I am not sure if that is yet recorded.

All in all, Ségo might have emerged smiling from a potentially damaging episode had it not been for three others.

First she had been called upon to slap down her partner, François Hollande, general secretary of the party and routinely portrayed by cartoonists as the henpecked man indoors, when he came out with some contentious thoughts on income tax.

Conservatives seized on the dispute with glee, claiming that the socialist mask had been allowed to slip.

Then Le Monde printed unwelcome details of a party summit behind closed doors at which a defensive Ségo had to justify her low-key, let's appeal to the grass roots sort of campaigning style.

A member had deliberately telephoned a reporter and left the call connected throughout the exchanges.

Worst of all, Ségo has now taken the extraordinary step, for a candidate entering a presidential campaign that appears neck-and-neck, of suspending her spokesman Arnaud Montebourg, a familar face at a time when she needs as many as possible batting for her.

His crime? To say on television: "Ségolène Royal has only one flaw. It's her partner."

M Montebourg says it was a joke. His famously bossy boss said he had been given a well-deserved yellow card, sin-binned for a month. Either way - sense of humour breakdown or poor choice of close aide - the outcome reflects badly on her.

At least, as I began by suggesting, she has packed all these troubles into the same uncomfortable spell.

But she needs a good, swift recovery. How she performs during the rest of these early stages of the campaign may yet prove significant for the many voters whose minds are there to be changed.

The socialist guru among Sarko's new best friends

French socialists were choking on their coffee and croissants this morning as they took in the small print of Nicolas Sarkozy's speech at the Porte de Versailles shindig launching him as the centre-Right presidential candidate.

Image: lfone.

If the trouble with French streets is that too many of them are named after Jean Jaurès, as a character remarked in the 1970s Gérard Depardieu film Maitresse, the trouble with Jaurès is that his admirers now apparently include Sarko.

François Hollande, general secretary of the Parti Socialiste and the father of Ségolène Royal's children, thinks the old lefty must be rattling round in the grave to which an assassin consigned him on the eve of France's entry into the First World War.

Hollande did not need to complete his own indignant riposte: "Pauvres Jaurès! If only he had known that one day his name would be cited at a conference of the French Right......."

I dread to think what some of those Right-wing tubthumpers who champion Sarko so enthusiatically would make of his soft spot for Jaurès.

This, after all, was the man who helped create the party of Hollande and Ségo, founded what became France's Communist paper L'Humanité and opposed the Great War (it was his pacifistic objections to the conflict that got him killed).

But let us not forget Margaret Thatcher on the steps of 10 Downing Street, marking her arrival as Prime Minister by adopting the words of St Francis of Assisi.

"Where there is discord, may we bring harmony," she declared. "Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope."

Others were to assess quite harshly how much harmony, truth, faith and hope Maggie and her ministers brought, for example, to east Durham and South Wales.

Hollande may regard Sarko as having misappropriated the heritage of a French socialist hero. The Left-of-centre Libération took a slightly kinder view.

"Can a man who invokes Jaurès, Hugo, Mandel and Zola be wholly bad?" the paper asked. "Can a man who wants an irreproachable democracy be accused of rampant Le Pen-ism? Is a man who talks at length about the rights of the badly housed and the welfare of others be described as ultra-liberal?"

While conceding that there was much of the "well-known Sarkozy cynicism" in all this, the Libé editorialist was gracious enough to conclude that for all that could be said to Sarko's detriment, he had produced an impressive performance.

Over to you Ségo.

Marine Le Pen and the pink culottes

The National Front is a Nazi front. So the counter-demonstrators always chanted when I was reporting on its marches, and I am quite sure they held similar sentiments about Jean-Marie Le Pen’s French equivalent, the Front National.

But is Le Pen’s daughter Marine trying to force the party to change Nazi front to Nicer front?

Among a set of new posters she launched for the party’s 2007 presidential election campaign was one showing a young woman of obvious Arab origin in Le Pen supporting mode.

“Ils ont tout cassé,” the girl says, thumb down as she echoes the FN’s contemptuous judgment on the mainstream French Left and Right: roughly speaking, they’ve failed you, the French, on all the issues that matter.

She does not leave it there. The pose finds her alongside four keynote symbols of your nicer Front National – nationality, integration, social mobility, secularism.

And, horror of horrors, she is wearing not a modest headscarf and sensible all-over clothing but low-slung jeans, showing bare midriff and – clearly enough to give the FN’s old codgers heart failure - the top of her pink knickers, or culotte rose as the French press helpfully puts it.

The girl’s deeper thoughts on immigration are so far unrecorded, at least to my knowledge. Le Pen himself certainly hasn't changed; he was getting agitated again on the subject only the other day, accusing the French government of lying about the true scale of immigration from the Third World.

But then I am currently in London and the French press may for once have set about doing what the British papers would already have done in similar circumstances and unearthed our lepéniste maghrébine.

Le Figaro's coy account of the affair quotes a prominent FN official with a name splendidly evocative of both militarism and Germany, Martial Bild, as acknowledging that the mode of dress may be “too much” - uttered in English for effect – for some.

But Marine Le Pen, the FN's vice-president and strategic director of its Elysée campaign, insisted that no one was challenging the principles behind the poster campaign. The only reservations, she said, concerned the visible thong.

“Some French people of immigrant origin are aware of the failure (of Left and Right) and a lot of those are turning to Jean-Marie Le Pen for answers,” she added.

Even old lags, I suppose, should be allowed a chance of rehabilitation.

But while Martine Le Pen and Martial Bild congratulate their party for moving forward in a positive way and doing what would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, I have one nagging spoilsport thought.

If the Front National is no longer to be an odious party of racism and other base human instincts, what is it for at all?

The way to treat a lady

Even as Nicolas Sarkozy formally announces what everyone has known for years - that he intends to stand for the French presidency - an eye-catching trip by Ségolène Royal to the Middle East threatens to steal his thunder.

Sarko undeniably represents a formidable obstacle to Mme Royal's hopes of becoming the first female president.

But just how formidable is becoming increasingly tricky to gauge as the Ségo phenomenon continues to achieve the improbable - making French politics interesting outside France in what is still a non-election year.

International attention packs little electoral muscle, of course. Yet even that works both ways; a lot of the overseas support for Sarko tends to come from the sort of conservatives from whom millions of French voters would run a kilometre or two.

At home, Sarko plainly has work to do, and an illuminating vox pop in Le Figaro offers a little advice on how he should treat a lady when that lady stands between him and the Elysée.

The paper canvassed the views of several prominent females from the party and the responses revealed hints of anxiety that M Sarkozy's tendency to shoot first and reflect later may cost him votes.

"Nicolas must take care not to be aggressive, but to tackle her ideas and not the person," warned Isabelle Debré, a UMP senator. "The slightest gesture could be raise charges of misogyny."

Arlette Franco, from the western Pyrénées, wanted to see more of a side to Sarko that we generally encounter only when he is having one of his marital reconciliations.

"He needs to offer reassurance, to show himself to be warm, human and interested in social questions as well as security," she said.

Another Arlette - Grosskost, from Haut-Rhin - suggested that Sarko should surround himself with more women, lighten his hard-line image and acknowledge that Mme Royal's appeal by-passed political logic.

And a Parisian MP, Martine Aurillac, went so far as to offer the sort of counsel even France's macho hommes politiques would consider patronising: "Don't launch into discussions that are too technical, statistical, complicated."

Her theme was taken up by Valérie Pécresse, spokesman for the centre-Right UMP party of which Sarko is president. Confronting a female opponent, she said, was to be engaged not in a classic clash of forces but in a clash of conviction.

"You have to address the people in very simple terms," she said, while adding loyally that Sarko understood this parfaitement.

The subtext of all this is clear enough. Sarko may be capable
of tearing Ségo apart in contentious debate, but should weigh up whether it would actually do him much good?

We know Mme Royal has so far shown little substance to go with the lashings of style, a point of view that surfaced in France long before it became a British media cliché.

It has done her little damage in the polls. One of my own human barometers of middle France opinion, a middle-aged, mid-management bank employee (and typical UMP voter) living in the provinces, summed it up quite neatly.

"You say we don't know what she stands for, that she is woolly on the main issues," he said. "I think that's part of what the French like about her. There's less to be scared of."

Sarko profits this week from a flurry of attention surrounding his announcement. But unless Ségo commits some appalling gaffe in Lebanon, Israel or the Palestinian territories, she stands a good chance of bagging at least equal airtime and headlines for the right reasons.

Adding a thought after the event, it is even possible to say that when the gaffe came - failing to slap down a Hizbollah attempt to equate Israel with the Nazis - she and her supporters performed some smart wriggling.

We should all stand by, I'd guess, for a little more evidence of Ségo steel in the coming weeks and months, and for the odd sign of a mellower Sarko.

He may have taken heed of those female colleagues already. The famous promise of "rupture" - implying a complete break with failed policies of France's recent past, however this might enrage surly unions and those desperate to cling to outdated privilege - has already been watered down.

Now, he says, it will be a "peaceful rupture".