Ségo and Dave: are they related?

The resemblance first struck me when, spotting Cameron’s waxy forehead on the front page of a newspaper recently, I unfolded the paper to find that the forehead belonged to French Socialist party candidate Ségolène Royal. It got me wondering whether similarities between the two extended beyond their oddly embalmed complexions.

Politically, of course, they should be opposites, yet Royal has edged so far to the Right (to howls of protest from old French socialists) and Cameron so far to the Left (to equally noisy protests from Thatcherite Tories) that they seem destined to meet somewhere in the middle. Old socialists are appalled by 53-year-old ‘Ségo’ for adopting conservative policies to woo voters tired of unworkable statist solutions; and, like Cameron, she has been busy stealing oppositionist clothes, by suggesting that parents should be allowed to shop around for good schools.

Crucially, neither is an ideologue. What they appear to want most is stardom. Cameron’s political hunger, fuelled by youth and untainted by experience, breeds excitement in those surrounding him. Royal’s appetite for power — equally attractive to voters — has been growing for 20 years. That’s how long this mother of four has waited to get where she is. And like any French politician worth their salt, she has always had a ‘destiny’. As early as 1988, in Orléans, she began her remarkable media-political ascent by making a speech celebrating Joan of Arc.

‘In a world which had been confiscated by men, Joan of Arc committed a triple sacrilege: being a woman of strategy, a female warrior, and a woman of God. The worst offence being that she came from nothing. Very soon, Joans around the world will make themselves known.’

The self-regarding ring of this statement gave a foretaste of Royal’s primary piece of weaponry: her sex.