Strauss-Kahn's loo chinwag with Sarkozy

All right, so let's end the week with the news to end all news, as reported "exclusively" (and then picked up by other French media outlets) in the weekly magazine, Le Point.

It involves the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK): the two men who could just go head-to-head in the race for this country's presidency in 2012.

The story dates back to September this year during the G20 summit in Pittsburgh when Strauss-Kahn reportedly took Sarkozy to task while the two men were taking a loo break.

Yes, even the powerful need to make a trip to the restroom now and again.

And DSK was nothing if not candid, telling the French president that he was fed up with the repeated gossip about his private life.

"I'm sick and tired of it," he said. "And especially the supposed files and photos that could be used against me," he continued.

"I know the source is the Elysée (the president's official office), so tell your guys to stop it otherwise I'll get the courts involved."

So what brought upon the apparent outburst?

Well a few days earlier a book had been released in France, "Hold-uPS, arnaques et trahisons" in which two political journalists, Karim Rissouli and Antonin Andréa, took a critical and controversial look at the French Socialist party in recent years, its leading figures and its divisions; a sort of "tell all" if you will.

The book included a remark made in 2006 by Frédéric Lefebvre, then a member of Sarkozy's campaign team and now spokesman for the governing centre-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement, UMP) party, about the possibility of DSK being the Socialist party's candidate and therefore Sarkozy's opponent in the 2007 presidential election.

Lefebvre is alleged to have told Rissouli and Andréa that the UMP had information that would seriously damage DSK's reputation should he become his party's candidate.

"It wouldn't take a week," he was quoted as saying." We have the photographs. They exist. And if we release them, the French won' like it."

An explosive (putting it mildly) assertion, which Lefebvre insisted he had never made, but one which obviously remained with DSK, whose lawyer in Paris, Jean Veil, confirmed to Le Point that he had been instructed to file a complaint should there be "any more defamatory assertions."

Somehow the race for the 2012 French presidency - although still a long way off - is already promising to be an interesting one.