According to the prosecution, who wiretapped his and his lawyer’s mobiles for months, Sarkozy had suggested to the judge that he could secure a prestigious job for him in return for information about a separate case. News of the scandal dominated headlines in France and around the world, hitting Sarkozy hard. None of the investigations, of which there have been half a dozen, have ever come to anything – that is, until earlier this year when the former president’s luck ran out and he was finally convicted of trying to bribe a judge in 2014, two years after he left power. This is despite the pair facing the ultimate relationship test – a string of legal challenges, brought about, Sarkozy claims, by ‘activist judges’, all of which he has strongly denied. Thirteen years, one presidency and two election defeats (in 2012, and in the 2017 Republican primaries) later, Bruni and Sarkozy are still married, and by all accounts, closer than ever. ‘ gives us wonderful vignettes of the Sarkozys’ fake marital displays,’ Sasha Swire wrote blithely in Diary of an MP’s Wife, in an entry for 2010. Mistrust extended beyond France’s borders. ‘His roving eye will find someone else the minute she’s off to have Botox,’ a Republican party grandee smugly predicted at a dinner party. (Republican Sarkozy lost to his socialist opponent François Hollande.) ‘She’ll drop him if he loses in 2012,’ a politician friend told me knowingly. These two, the siren supermodel and the twice-married ‘President Bling-Bling’ – a nickname given to him by the press due to his fondness for Rolex watches, gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses and hobnobbing with moguls – were publicity hounds, the perceived wisdom went. France isn’t a betting country, but when Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni decided to get married in 2008, after a two-month courtship, many of France’s chattering classes were already starting to guess the likely divorce date.
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