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.