HILLARY - Helps out Chirac's long-suffering wife

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Times, UK

Hillary helps out Chirac's long-suffering wife

Matthew Campbell, Paris

PRESIDENT Jacques Chirac has received an unexpected boost from across the Atlantic as he prepares for elections next March. He has secured the help of Hillary Clinton, the New York senator and former American first lady, to turn Bernadette, his wife of 4Å decades, into the star of his campaign.

In a publicity coup for the Chiracs, Clinton appeared in a French television broadcast last week about the 68-year-old matron of the Elysée Palace. It coincided with the publication of Bernadette's book, in which she reveals that she considered divorcing her husband because of his romantic adventures.

Clinton, whose own marital problems are part of American presidential history, praised Bernadette as a friend and claimed that the example of the French first lady, an elected official in the Chiracs' home district of Corrèze, helped her to decide to run for the Senate in New York. "She really was a role model for me," Clinton said from Washington as Bernadette sat beaming in a Paris television studio.

Behind the juxtaposition of the two women under such carefully choreographed circumstances there appeared to lurk an extraordinary political calculation: that some of the icon status of Hillary, who won great support among Americans over enduring her husband's well publicised philandering, might rub off on Bernadette.

Election boost: Bernadette Chirac with Hillary Clinton Photograph: Katsumi Kasahara

Hillary, whose style and elegance make her a much admired figure in fashion obsessed France, will serve the Chirac charm offensive well.

She may also have cause to sympathise with Bernadette, who spoke for the first time last week about the difficulties of living with a man who enjoys "enormous success" with women and whose favourite phrase is "I'm off".

In her book Conversation, based on interviews with her, she says she often warned her husband that "Napoleon started to lose everything the day he abandoned Josephine".

The presenter of the two-hour programme said the interview with Clinton, originally scheduled for mid-September, was cancelled after the World Trade Center attacks. However, following a visit by Chirac to America where he surveyed the wreckage in New York, word reached Paris that the senator would be available.

Clinton's intervention has raised eyebrows among supporters of Lionel Jospin, the Socialist prime minister who is almost certain to stand against Chirac. "It seems President Chirac called his friends the Clintons to ask for this favour," said a Socialist party spokesman.

-- Anonymous, October 27, 2001


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