Any other business | 21 May 2011

Another tale of the Great Seducer and my tip for the woman to succeed him

When I was young I knew a man whose opening gambit with any pretty girl was, ‘Hello, shall we go straight to bed?’ He reckoned one in 20 said yes, so if he asked the question 20 times a day, he would never be lonely. All accounts of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF chief and would-be French presidential candidate who has been charged with sexually assaulting a New York hotel chambermaid, suggest a similar approach.

In the late 1990s — during the tenure of ‘DSK’ as France’s minister of finance and not long after his third marriage — an attractive female journalist of my acquaintance was sent to interview him at the French embassy in London. She left a card with her contact details, and as she left the building her mobile phone rang. It was DSK, suggesting they get together somewhere more private. She declined. He persisted. Finally he suggested she join him for dinner with Peter Mandelson and other New Labour insiders, an invitation that sounded sufficiently safe and interesting to accept. All went well apart from some whispering about ‘Dominique’s latest bit of fluff’ among the other guests; DSK kept his hands to himself but again pressed her to join him à deux afterwards. Again she declined, and after a few more emails he gave up the chase. ‘You hear similar stories about Bill Clinton,’ my friend tells me, ‘but those women always say how charmed they were. This guy was just… slimy.’

Cherchez la femme


Strauss-Kahn had been expected to step down shortly as managing director of the IMF to pursue his presidential bid, so there was already plenty of betting on who might succeed him.