E-mail in response to my column on France here:

Mr Lowry, If you don’t know it, I thought you might find it amusing that the person who called Sarkozy a “neocon with a French passport” is one Eric Besson, a socialist MP who was tasked by Royal with writing a report on Sarkozy in order to make him look terribly dangerous. The quote comes from this report. Later on, Mr Besson was asked to translate Royal’s program into financial figures, but he soon resigned from Royal’s campaign for untold reasons. It seems that things were not going very well among Royal’s staff. When asked what she thought of Besson’s resignation, Royal said: “Who knows Mr Besson anyway?” Besson did not like it and, a couple of weeks later, published a book titled “Who knows Mrs Royal”, in which he describes Royal in a very unsympathetic manner. Finally, Mr Besson decided to join Sarkozy’s campaign last Sunday and made a speech at a UMP meeting in which he talked about the report he had written months earlier. That is quite unusual.