BEST OF A BAD LOT?:

Nicolas Sarkozy: Could this wily, dynamic rival of Chirac's ever win the French presidency? (Tim King, July 2004, Prospect uk)

At the moment, the public loves him because he gets things done. He has prodigious energy and seems to understand what is going on in France. Most French ministers stay in their ministries, ruminating on policy, if necessary summoning their partenaires sociaux (trade unions and employers) in a ritual dance of consultation. When Sarkozy became minister of the interior, the refugee holding centre at Sangatte near Calais was a real problem to both French and British governments, but no French minister had bothered to go there. Sarkozy went, saw and sorted it out. He worked with similar directness over security: he went round the country listening to ordinary policemen and women, imbuing them with importance, giving them medals and offering bonuses for increased "productivity." It may not get to the root of street violence, any more than closing a refugee centre will solve the immigration issue, but the public has the impression that the leaky ship is being patched up.

He is an inspired orator, and there are few things he loves as much as working up a live audience. He is also a skilled television debater - he has twice taken part in a live programme in which for 100 minutes he confronts a series of opponents whose sole aim is to wear him down and destroy him in front of millions. The first time he faced Jean-Guy Talamoni, a Corsican nationalist politician, Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France's racist Front National, and Elizabeth Guigou, former minister of justice. Thoroughly prepared, able to quote figures on apparently any subject without notes, he ran rings round all of them. At one point the elegant Guigou declared that police officers in a particular police station were racist. "I'll go there," said Sarkozy, with typical directness, "tomorrow at 8am. See you there?" Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

He is a clever strategist, frequently wrong-footing his opponents by passing laws that were proposed in their manifestos. When minister of the interior he achieved two things which the socialists had been promising for years: establishing a national committee to co-ordinate the different Islamic factions, and ending "double punishment," the system whereby foreigners convicted of a crime first served a prison sentence then, on release, were repatriated. Now certain categories of foreigners ("de facto Frenchmen") may be spared repatriation. "He's on the right, but he doesn't want to become locked into the contradictions of ideology. He wants his laws to be balanced and fair," Thierry Saussez, a political consultant who has worked with Sarkozy for 20 years, told me. When he gets something wrong, he has the much-appreciated humility to go on television and say that it's his fault. He also has personal courage. In 1993, a man took 21 schoolchildren hostage in Neuilly, threatening to blow them up. Sarkozy was budget minister in Paris at the time, but as mayor of Neuilly he drove straight to the school and remained there, negotiating the release of some of the children and offering to exchange himself for the rest. The minister of the interior and prime minister stayed in their offices.

Whatever he does, he makes sure the public sees him doing it. Every day he is on the news in connection with some positive thing he is fighting for. He knows that to achieve the reforms essential to make France work better the public has to be involved.

If Sarkozy were a character in a work of fiction, he would strain credibility - except perhaps as a Shakespearean villain. Indeed his ruthlessness, energy and strength recall Machiavelli's vertù, that essential quality for a politician. Sarkozy's father, Pal Nagy Bosca y Sarközy, a dispossessed Hungarian aristocrat, joined the French foreign legion to escape Stalin. He made his way to Paris, there married a young law student whose family was Jewish and Greek. He sired three children with her and left. Nicolas, abandoned by his father, spent most of his childhood in front of the television. In May 1968, 13-year-old Nicolas, already on the right, marched with those supporting De Gaulle. Having thrown up his studies in political science in his second year, his first choice of career was to be a journalist, but in fact he became a barrister. He was 20 when he addressed a rally of young conservatives in Nice and caught Prime Minister Chirac's attention. But given his background and lack of diplomas, success in politics would be hard. In 1983, aged 28, he took the first of the bold decisions that established him as a front-rank politician, making him implacable enemies on the way. He was a councillor in Neuilly, a staid suburb of Paris, and had worked his way into the entourage of Charles Pasqua, senator and a leader of the party, when the mayor of Neuilly died unexpectedly. The obvious replacement was Pasqua, but he had just gone into hospital for a minor operation, so Sarkozy proposed himself, even though he was in Pasqua's team. By the time the mighty senator woke from his anaesthetic, Sarkozy had charmed enough burghers of Neuilly to be elected. Pasqua, the first to be stung by Sarkozy's treachery, was furious, while his partner at the top of the RPR, the equally treacherous Jacques Chirac, laughed: "Everyone betrays everyone else in this job" - and he took Sarkozy into his heart.

Latching on to a father figure, using him and then betraying him has become a Sarkozy hallmark.