Jean-Francois and his master, Jacques

Jean-Francois Probst, ex-advisor to Jacques Chirac.

My friend Chirac is a merciless, smiling assassin, who loves killing his enemies like the Borgias did, without the victim knowing where the killer blow has come from...

When he smiles at you, makes promises to you, then expect the killer blow. Now I think he busy getting rid of Villepin and Sarkozy in one go. It's like something that used to happen among the Medici; he's of that family...

In the Sicilian sense of the word, the real 'clan' is made up of only three people, the 'Ceausescus', that is, Jacques, Bernadette, his wife and Claude, his daughter. They get together in the morning and decide: right, this afternoon I'll go for Sarkozy; you be nice to him and you play it half-half.

Final word?

He's a fighter, a winner; he never throws in the towel. And his daughter's like a manager shouting at the boxer in the ring, "Hit him! Hit him!"

From an article in La Stampa (in Italian)

Chirac calls. No-one at home.

I thought this was funny. Why a French competitor for CNN and the BBC is essential.

"Take the conflict in Lebanon this summer. If Jacques Chirac's call for a ceasefire - which didn't even make BBC or CNN - had been reported earlier, it could have brought about an earlier resolution of the conflict. If Chirac's call had been reported more widely it maybe could have saved thousands of lives. That was a story calling out for a French angle, given the historic links to Lebanon."

An earlier resolution to the conflict! Thousands of lives saved! If only they'd listened to Jack!