Barack Obama is very tall. Nicolas Sarkozy isn't. The French President is used to having the hottest political spouse in the world, and suddenly he hasn't. Right now, Michelle upstages Carla, and she didn't even have to organise a photo-shoot on the roof of the White House to do it. What is a man with a bruised ego to do in such circumstances? Evidently still smarting from his G20 experience, the French President hosted a "private" lunch last week and made disparaging observations about his American rival which were bound to reach a wider audience.
Sarkozy regards Obama as inexperienced and doesn't think Michelle's taste in clothes is a patch on Carla's. All right, I made the last bit up, but it's hard not to mock a politician who seeks the limelight so shamelessly. Carla Bruni, as she then was, had his measure from the start, turning up in flat shoes at a dinner to meet France's short and recently divorced leader; no wonder he fell head over heels in love and whipped her off on a whirlwind tour of royal burial sites. The trophy-wife thing served him better abroad than in France, not least when the Sarkozys came to London last year and the press went into raptures over Carla, but now there's a new First Lady on the block.
The French President isn't one to overlook slights and on Tuesday, not for the first time, he allowed his emotions to overrule his judgement. After cutting Obama down to size, he laid into the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel – how tedious the poor woman must find him – and described Spain's Prime Minister, Jose Luis Zapatero, as "not very intelligent", which was hardly statesmanlike. The President can expect a frosty welcome in Madrid later this month when he arrives for an official visit.
It's time he realised that trading the goodwill of other leaders for the momentary satisfaction of making a few barbed remarks isn't clever, and threatens to return France to the diplomatic isolation it suffered during the Bush presidency.
It's not even as if Sarkozy is having a good financial crisis. The OECD believes that French GDP will shrink by 3.3 per cent this year, not much better than its forecast for the UK; France is doing better than Germany, but there have been massive street protests about job losses and more are expected on May Day. Sarkozy's approval rating has slipped to 36 per cent, which means he is unlikely to tackle France's intractable long-term economic problems; top of the list is the swollen size of the French state, which employs almost 30 per cent of the workforce.
Sarkozy's hauteur and his habit of giving jobs to cronies have led to comparisons with le petit empereur: not Bonaparte, but his unloved nephew Napoleon III, first president of the Republic until he staged a coup d'état. This latest outburst has confirmed Sarkozy's reputation as a politician more interested in self-aggrandisement than statecraft. Incivility is rife on the internet, where bloggers prowl in the hope of finding an opportunity to trash someone more famous and powerful than themselves, but not many heads of state need to big themselves like this. Now the trophy wife isn't enough, perhaps he needs to reinvent himself as grandgarçon23.
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