Closer editor understands French hypocrisy over the president's dalliance

http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/jan/15/francois-hollande-privacy

Version 0 of 1.

As Jon Henley wrote of the François Hollande's press conference yesterday, where journalists refused to question him about his dalliance with Julie Gayet, "they do things differently in France."

But should journalists leave the president alone, tacitly accepting that his private life should not be subject to media scrutiny?

Of course, people should enjoy a private life free from unnecessary intrusion. But surely the president is in a unique position. He is, in a sense, the embodiment of the people. They have elected him to a special and privileged position and he must therefore be held to account by them.

Given that the people's representatives, their watchdogs, are the press, journalists have an obligation to ensure that individuals elected to power do not abuse their position.

If the president is engaged in a clandestine romance, there are several questions to ask, quite aside from whether it is seemly to double-date his first lady.

Has he put himself in a situation in which his security could be compromised? Has he opened himself to the possibility of blackmail? Does his romantic duplicity suggest he might also be politically duplicitous?

Furthermore, does the attention paid to his lover, and the arrangement of furtive meetings, mean that he is failing to carry out his presidential duties with sufficient attention?

As I write that list, I realise the subjective nature of these concerns and, to an extent, their triviality. There is no evidence that any of them apply in Hollande's case.

That's beside the point. They could do, and the people would not know. So the exposure of the president's second mistress, despite its intrusive nature, can be seen to be in the wider public interest.

I smiled as I watched TV news bulletin vox pops in which people in Parisian streets told interviewers, usually accompanied by a Gallic shrug, that they were uninterested in Hollande's affair.

I noted in my London Evening Standard column today the various responses: it's private, it's gossip, it's not news, it's nobody's business but their own.

But, as I also noted, these statements sit awkwardly with the fact that Closer, the magazine that broke the story, sold out across France. A second edition was then published, and it sold out quickly too.

I detect that the French people are as guilty of hypocrisy as the British people who routinely urge journalists to leave celebrities alone (remember Princess Diana?) while eagerly consuming every item of tittle-tattle about them.

The person who most understands this hypocrisy is the editor of the French issue of Closer, Laurence Pieau. She thumbed her nose at France's supposedly strict privacy legislation by publishing seven pages of pictures detailing the president's visits to Gayet.

If the courts do impose a penalty, she will take the heat. As far as she is concerned, press freedom questions aside, the commercial benefits outweigh the strictures of the legislation.

She did the same in September 2012 when she published topless photographs of the Duchess of Cambridge while sunbathing in a French chateau (though there was no genuine public interest justification for that).

Pieau is a journalist apart from her establishment colleagues who sat through yesterday's press conference without a murmur. There was not even a titter when the president called his economic strategy a "respectability pact."

The first question from the press was extraordinary. The journalist's opening statement was so grovelling it was if he was a supportive politician rather than a member of the press.

He merely asked the president if he would kindly clarify the status of the current first lady, Valérie Trierweiler. Hollande dealt with that easily. There was one follow-up question later, by the Associated Press reporter, but you could feel the rest of the press corps were not on his side.

Yes, they do things differently in France.... for now. But will it always be so? Does Closer represent a change of direction, or is it just a blip? I suspect the former.

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.