Sardanapale

According to a French online magazine, Cecilia Sarkozy, the First Lady, last month picked up her phone after reading a magazine profile of her she objected to, and castigated the offending journalist in these terms:

“Nicolas (her presidential husband) has already called your boss. Your career is finished. You’ll regret this.”

The details of the conversation are disputed, but the fact that it took place is not - see the French text opposite if you want to know more.

On this side of the blog (the one that matters) I want to focus on my main point: such an incident would have been unthinkable in my adoptive country, Britain.

In the unlikely event that Cherie Blair or Sarah Brown had let rip in this way, it would have been front-page news and a major embarrassment for 10 Downing Street. The online story was not picked up by any paper.

To illustrate the cultural difference between the British and the French in this respect, I’ll share with you how I got my first glimpse of it.

It was years ago. A friend of mine who had a senior job in a big news organization was explaining to me the art of effective complaining.

Uncharacteristically for a Briton, he would not let the slightest instance of shoddy service go unchallenged.

If his groceries were delivered late or his plane overbooked, he would be on the phone to the boss of Tesco’s or Virgin Atlantic within minutes.

He would not take “Mr Branson in a meeting, can he call you back?” for an answer. He would dig in and pester his man, who inevitably ordered his staff to do anything to get this troublemaker off his back.

My friend was a master. He would regularly receive flight upgrades and other compensatory freebies – and more important of all, he got groveling apologies.

I had assumed that his professional affiliation would be a major factor in his triumphs. Not a bit of it, he explained: he never mentioned his job in his complaints.

Or he would do so obliquely - by never giving the bastards his direct number at work, but the switchboard (”You’re through to the Big News Organization, how may I direct your call?”) and his extension.

You might think: the guy was doing it in a sneaky, English way, but he was still trying to intimidate his opponent. You’d be wrong. There is something very British in his attitude, but it is wholly admirable.

His game bespeaks an abhorrence of crude threats of the “do-you-realize-who-you’re-messing-with” variety so familiar to us continentals.

After years of drip feeding, I feel I have fully absorbed British values. But although I emotionally share my friend’s scruples, even now I struggle to make sense of sense of them on an intellectual level.

My best guess is that by making it a contest of might rather than right, he would have damaged his own case – as well as perhaps been asking for trouble – and that he would have demeaned his job by stating openly that the power and resources which went with it were available for the personal use of whoever wielded them.

Those are dim conjectures from a recent convert to decency. But I do know that my friend was right to refrain from using his position in a private dispute.

And he was right in a profound way which – as the lack of fuss over Cecilia sarkozy’s tantrum suggests – my countrymen have yet to grasp.

Protectionism, I noted a few weeks ago after reading Bryan Caplan, is not a con game played by the elites on unsuspecting voters: it is backed by popular demand.

I was reminded of that fact while listening to the wireless the other day.

Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë was being accused by a journalist of failing the country by not being protectionist enough.

The subject at hand was a city contract awarded to a French company for the delivery of 1,400 bicycles whose manufacture had been outsourced to Hungary.

“Did you not have at least a moral obligation to reserve this contract to French-made bikes?” the journalist asked accusingly.

“How many jobs did you create in Hungary?”

Delanoë replied:

“Two companies were bidding for this contract: one French, one American.

To be honest with you – and at the risk of comforting my accusers – if the American firm had made a better offer, I would have chosen it.

I remind you that this service (the delivery of bicycles by an outdoor advertising company) does not cost a single euro to the Parisians.

It will even bring 3 million euros to the city, which enables me to pay for kindergartens, a streetcar system and social housing.”

All very true. A bidder for a public contract must not be judged by his nationality, any more than by his race (as is the case in many US cities) or his contributions to secret funds (as was the case in Paris under Mayor Jacques Chirac).

The sole criterion must be the bid.

Generally, to assess an economic measure, you must focus on the interest of the consumer, not that of the producer.

No country ever grew rich by restricting national consumption to national production.

This is why outsourcing is good for the outsourcer.

On this point Delanoë, a socialist, has a thing or two to teach right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The merger between state-owned Gaz de France (GDF) and Suez, a private energy and environment group, points to a fact of French economic life that many tend to neglect: the use of privatisation by the government to maintain its stranglehold on the economy.

This fact dawned on me when I heard senior politicians defend the merger last weekend.

Prime Minister François Fillon pointed out that even though the new group would be under private ownership, the state would remain the largest single shareholder.

“We are retaining control; we will decide on strategy,” he said.

President Nicolas Sarkozy’s chief of staff, for his part, hailed “the birth of a French energy giant” and announced a “strong industrial policy”.

I now realize that it mattered little whether the policy was nationalisation – as espoused by socialist governments in the late 1940s and 1981-2 - or privatisation - as undertaken under both right and the left-wing governments in the past 20 years.

The main objective was always to keep the levers of economic power in political hands.

As a result France’s “shareholder government”, which has succeeded straightforward public ownership, remains firmly in control.

State companies have been turned into limited and listed companies, but with the state keeping big slices of the shares in key firms (32% of France Telecom, 30% of Thales, a defence company, 18% of Air France, and 15% of Renault, and 35% of the future Suez-GDF).

As the Economist noted recently, despite the privatisations

“the size of French state-owned enterprises, relative to the economy, is still the highest in western Europe. Include businesses where the state owns minority stakes above 10%, and no less than one-tenth of the French economy is partly state-owned.

The value of state-owned enterprises’ assets is around $400 billion, compared with just over $30 billion in Britain. State-owned firms employ about 5% of the total workforce, compared with less than 1% in Britain.

Indeed, with 1.3m workers, the state sector in France employs some 200,000 more people today than after the great wave of post-war nationalisations in 1945-46.”

Despite his reformist rhetoric – designed to appeal to pro-market suckers like myself - Sarkozy remains what all his predecessors were: a champion of the political-industrial complex.