Knotted

Well he promised the media would only find out after the event, and so it turned out. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, must be as pleased as punch that he once again managed to scoop the press as he took the former model-turned singer, Carla Bruni, to be his lawfully wedded.

Saturday lunchtime – a full week ahead of the much rumoured “surprise” ceremony, Nicolas and Carla – for the past two months now there has been no need for surnames here in France as everyone knows who is meant - officially tied the knot, with Bruni becoming Mrs Sarkozy mark III in a service at the president’s official residence, the Elysée palace.

Not bad going for a couple who met less than three months ago and a huge sigh of relief all round for protocol as Nicolas no longer has to drag along his justice minister, Rachida Dati, on his state trips abroad because he now has a proper First Lady.

It’ll also surely please France’s quietly-suffering prime minister, François Fillon, who has been privately complaining recently that his boss did not have his mind on affairs of state and had somewhat lost the plot in the whirlwind of his Bling Bling courtship.

A dramatic drop in popularity in yet another opinion poll released last week would certainly seem to back up the widely-held belief that Nicolas has had other matters on his mind. Add to that his declared on-off involvement in next month’s local election campaign and his complete lack of progress in delivering on his own election campaign promise to increase spending power, and it’s not difficult to see why his approval rating has plummeted to an all-time low.

It would be easy to criticise the courtship as a form of presidential speed dating followed by speed marriage, but it’s typical of the breakneck pace at which Sarkozy seems to run both his personal and professional life.

Divorced from Mrs mark II, Cecilia, last October, Nicolas only met his Carla in November, and a month later the two were famously spotted and snapped at their first stage-managed public outing at Eurodisney. An equally media-friendly photo opportunity of a holiday followed in Egypt and Jordan. And at a press conference in January, the president confirmed that he and Bruni were a serious item and marriage was more than likely on the horizon.

There has to be some doubt as to whether the weekend’s nuptials will help stem the momentum of growing public dissatisfaction of the French with their president. In fact it could herald the beginning of a difficult period for him.

His new wife is known not to share some of his political beliefs and comes with a past, which is there in black and white, and often very vivid colour.

Glossy magazines will probably keep dragging up pictures of her exploits for as long as they continue to boost circulation figures – and all the evidence is that plastering a picture of either Carla or Nicolas on the front cover can do just that.

And there’ll also be the inevitable questions about what will happen to her singing career. She reportedly has a new album scheduled and a tour was in the planning.

Since coming to office last May, Sarkozy has changed the rules of politics by opening up the government and inviting in the opposition. At the same time he has reinvented the public role of the president to such an extent that his private life is very much part of the public domain – a novelty for the French.

And it is clearly a fact that the country is now going to have to live with.

If nothing else, and highly appropriate given their first public outing together last December the Sarkozy’s are proving that the “world is really turning Disney and there’s nothing we can do”. Sigh