News that France’s (young) economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, likes to have his wife, Brigitte Trogneux, present at departmental meetings with his advisers because he “makes better decisions” if she is around has been greeted, presumably by real men who never listen to women, with barely concealed derision. Ms Trogneux, who has the added news appeal that comes from being nearly 20 years older than her husband, and his former schoolteacher, and also strikingly good looking, thus joins the long roll call of intelligent female partners of politicians who are assumed, say, Lysistrata-like to be withholding sex in order to influence state policy. Challenged, Ms Trogneux herself quoted the words of Montaigne on the virtues of “rubbing and polishing” one brain against another.
In a democracy, it is right that eyebrows are raised when a politician brings in a partner in a quasi-official capacity; they certainly were when Nicolas Sarkozy employed his then wife Cecilia as an adviser, or when Bill Clinton gave Hillary a formal health policy role. Mr Macron, a neo-Blairite, cherishes presidential ambitions which depend on the success of bold employment reforms that do not endear him to traditional socialists. Maybe he does value the vote-winning potential of his wife’s glamour; but that hardly prevents him valuing her opinion too. The backstage influence of a partner of either gender (Margaret Beckett is invariably accompanied by her husband Leo) is a constant in many political narratives. History will judge its true significance; right now it may just make a better headline than the French economy.
