Thank You for the Moment is a painful read – and not just for Hollande
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Version 0 of 1. I met a sex therapist last week. For professional reasons, I should probably add. He told me that women only become interested in pornography when there’s a storyline, and that storyline is always the same: beautiful woman meets the bad boy with just a glint of gold, and sets out to redeem him through the power of her love. “That’s Fifty Shades,” he said. “That’s Twilight. That’s True Blood.” That’s also, he could have added, Thank You for the Moment, the bombshell masquerading as a book by former French first lady Valérie Trierweiler, published in the UK next week. “I should have known he was lying,” says Trierweiler of her former lover François Hollande. “I’d caught him telling fibs in the past.” But she thought their love was “unbreakable”. How quickly, she muses, “a fairytale can unravel”. The book appears to be a string of breathless cliches, laced with enough venom to sink a government, let alone one pompous narcissist who seems to have constructed an entire career around a fragile ego. Hollande sounds as appealing as Trierweiler, and about as talented in his chosen field. He also sounds very much like the man Trierweiler says she fell in love with. Philandering liar lies? Quelle surprise. From the extracts, at least, it’s an excruciating read, entirely lacking anything you might call common sense. If this is what the French call an elite, then heaven help the poor people Trierweiler says Hollande calls “the toothless”. But what’s even more depressing is that Trierweiler seems to have decided to make revenge her life’s work. It was Nora Ephron, of course, who told young women to “be the heroine of your life, not the victim”. Perhaps they should be banned from Trierweiler’s book tour. Too far-fetched for fiction Fifty Shades of Fifa has yet to be added to EL James’s franchise, but all the ingredients are there. The tortuous contracts, gagging agreements, secret meetings and flashes of lavish wealth apparently needed to sell 100m copies of a bad book also seem to have played a large part in securing as World Cup host the least football-friendly country in the world. Each day in Fifa-land brings new twists. A report commissioned by, er, Fifa, into allegations of corruption cast doubt on England and cleared Qatar. Now, a whistleblower called Phaedra (not a name often linked to a happy outcome) is being protected by the FBI after speaking out about corruption in relation to the Qatar bid, and is, she says, living in fear of her life. Fifa’s “top investigator” doesn’t like the summary of his report issued by Fifa judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, but Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, is refusing to publish the full report. Oh, and Eckert is actually Fifa’s head of “ethics”. A twist too far, perhaps, even for EL James. Stick it up your punter, eh? The Sun is a clever newspaper which gives its readers what they want, which is what we all want: information, entertainment and fun. The Sun was as outraged as everyone else claimed to be when the then chief whip Andrew Mitchell was accused of calling Downing Street police officers “fucking plebs”. That accusation cost him his career. Mitchell is suing the Sun over the story, and Bob Geldof has taken time off from saving Africa to try to save the reputation of a man he says is a friend. Mitchell, said Geldof, would never use “the ridiculous and archaic expression ‘pleb’”. But a separate trial, of a senior Sun reporter for paying public officials, has been told that Sun reporters called Sun readers “plebs”. A strange way, you might think, to refer to people the paper has described as “the backbone of Britain”. Still, at least they didn’t call them “the toothless”. |