Dati, Flint and Mrs. Ulgine Barrows
What have Rachida Dati and Caroline Flint in common?
Dans un reportage extrait de l’émission “66 Minutes”, diffusé lundi 14 décembre sur M6, Rachida Dati, députée européenne et maire du 7e arrondissement parisien, affirme lors d’une conversation téléphonique “je n’en peux plus”, oubliant le micro des journalistes : “Je pense qu’il va y avoir un drame avant que je finisse mon mandat. Je suis obligée de rester là, de faire la maligne, parce qu’il y a un peu de presse.”
Dati dialled a friend on her mobile phone. “I can’t take any more!” she fumed. “I just can’t take any more. I think I’ll go crazy before I’m finished my term. I’ve got to stay here because the media are around and there’s the re-election of Barroso [President of the EU Commission]… The trouble is when you’re in Strasbourg they can see if you vote or not. If you don’t [vote], it means you weren’t there.”
Caroline Flint’s own fit of pique was well documented. She claimed that in Gordon Brown’s Government women were used as “a smokescreen, a way of making it look like you’ve got a lot of women around the table” without letting them influence anything. In her case, she harrumphed off but in Dati’s she was given the bullet for “her brazen displays of wealth at a time when most of the country was suffering as a result of the economic downturn.”
Both were highly ambitious and essentially new brooms who managed to alienate – Dati promoted above her competence level to push through justice reforms and annoying many in the process, Flint earning the ire of her own department. This reminds me very much of Carly Fiorina, Patricia Dunn and Mrs. Ulgine Barrows in James Thurber’s The Catbird Seat.
They made more enemies than one could ordinarily expect of a high-placed personage and gave ammunition to their enemies by their petulance and desire to ram through their own will.
In short, they were full of themselves and their elevation but saw it as a stepping stone further up, admittedly as many a politician has done.
The difference is that they also drank in the compliments about their beauty – Caroline Flint with her now infamous fashion shoot and Dati with similar, often appearing on the front cover and inside pages of Paris Match.
Both women have now fallen into obscurity and it will be interesting to see how they come back from here. Petulant people only lay themselves open to their enemies, as Dati did with Green MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who said: “I told you she wouldn’t be able to take it. I’ll buy you a bottle of champagne if she’s still around a year from now.”
It wasn’t completely their fault. The media, the public, everyone really, played up their physical attraction and ignored their incompetence, that they were out of their league. When it came down to it though, the bitter reality hit home.
It really will be interesting to observe their progress.
Filed under: Politics & economics
