They’re at it again, the French, God bless them. President Francois Hollande gives a make-or-break interview hoping it will reverse his political fortunes, which see him with a 12 per cent approval rating. The high-minded section of the press dissects his plans to bring unemployment down – and ignores a gossip magazine’s reports that Hollande has resumed his relationship with the actress Julie Gayet.

It’s not just the press, either. In France, privacy laws are stricter than they are in most other democracies. Hollande brushed aside questions about the bestselling allegations made by his former official companion, Valerie Trierweiler (their relationship broke down after Hollande’s affair with Gayet made the news) and he got away with it. But the French public seems as understanding as the press.

Earlier this year, the French Institute of Public Opinion found that 77 per cent considered Hollande’s affair to be a private matter; his personal ratings even went up marginally. BBC correspondent Adam Gopnik has tried to capture the French attitude. Apart from sexual coercion and paedophilia, he said, from the French point of view there is no greater sexual sin than Puritanism. There is no greater prurience than the desire to drag the private out into the public sphere.

Sexual adventures by politicians turn out to be of public interest far more often than we care to admit

Gopnik is echoing the anecdotal findings of earlier journalistic soundings. One journalist reported the French as flabbergasted that the US could make such a fuss about then US President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. A bourgeois matron even told her interviewer that, in France, they would think there was something wrong with a politician who hadn’t had an affair or two.

Such is the portrait of the so-called French exception, which is customarily contrasted with Anglo-American coverage of political sex scandals. In this, if nothing else, Malta resembles France. But should it?

Is France a sophisticated and worldly model? Or does it just give an alibi for a patronising media establishment, which decides what the public has a right to know? Does the Anglo-American model free the public and enable it to make up its own mind? Or are the media taking liberties?

My short answer is this. The sexual escapades of politicians are not automatically of public interest; an adulterous politician is not automatically unfit for office. In practice, however, sexual adventures by politicians turn out to be of public interest far more often than we care to admit.

But first, a word of scepticism about the so-called cultural clash between France and the Anglo-Saxon world. The truth is that the real weighty differences lie in the legal provisions, not the culture.

Celebrity gossip magazines sell as well in France as they do elsewhere. And in Anglo-America, there is a division of labour between the high-minded broadsheets – which only report on sexual scandals after they’ve broken out and spilled political blood – and the tabloids, with their platoons of paparazzi.

It’s not just a division of labour. It’s a division of discourse. The language reserved for the breaking of sex scandals – unless they are immediately tinged with law-breaking – is that of the Christmas pantomime dame, the headlines having fonts and layout to match.

When, a quarter of a century ago, the former UK Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown’s extramarital affair was revealed, the headline was: Paddy Pantsdown! (After which, his struggling personal ratings went up – so much for the absolute difference with the French.)

In other words, invoking cultural differences doesn’t settle the argument; there are no such radical differences. What we need are good crisp reasons in dealing with the three basic scenarios for sex scandals.

The first need not detain us. The scandals that brought down (say) Dominique Strauss-Kahn (the disgraced former IMF chief and French presidential hopeful) and severely damaged Silvio Berlusconi had sex as their context. However, the substantialaccusations made had to do with crime: rape (Strauss-Kahn), sex with a minor (Berlusconi), and organised orgies and prostitution (both).

No one should be sanguine about politicians accused of criminal offences. Crime is not a private matter, even if sex is the driver. It’s a democracy with a corrupt sense of right and wrong that permits a politician to flourish in the wake of crime.

The second scenario concerns the revelation of private sexual adventures with no discernible impact on a politician’s public conduct. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is generally considered to have conducted several affairs while US president; so did former French President Jacques Chirac, by his own coy suggestion, not to mention the disclosures by his wife and his former chauffeur.

But was that of public interest? The impact of Roosevelt’s extramarital affairs on his work is so intangible that the very evidence that he had them is almostall circumstantial. As for Chirac, it was arguably against the French public’s interest for his ex-chauffeur to reveal – a propos of the retinue of lovers entering and leaving Chirac’s office while he was mayor of Paris – that the women on Chirac’s staff referred to him as “Mr Three Minutes, shower included”.

That revelation did irreparable damage to the international leadership of France in the field of afternoon sex.

The advocates for complete disclosure on political sexcapades would argue this is all irrelevant. The point, they say, is not whether the revelations are followed by resignations. It’s that voters should know: any affair reveals something important about a politician’s character, which is relevant to his trustworthiness.

The problem with this argument is a practical one. Even courts of law, given the psychological intricacies of marital life, often find it difficult to determine culpability for marital misbehaviour (hence the legal fiction of no-fault divorce).

The prospects of analysing true character and culpability in the court of public opinion are even dimmer.

If the second scenario shows that it’s not always a matter of public interest to know about a politician’s private sexual adventures, the third shows that the public interest is involved far more often than we think.

There may be little evidence that Francois Mitterand’s secret second family had an impact on his work as president of France from 1981-95. But it is definitely of public interest to know that he ordered extensive illegal wiretapping to make sure the news remained secret.

We may be little interested in JohnF. Kennedy’s daily philandering – except that, at least twice, it had also endangered national security.

Hollande’s affair with Gayet may be entirely private except for one detail: it has been alleged that the apartment where they met in the past was owned by someone with mob connections.

The problem with all these affairs is not the sex. It’s the use and abuse of political power and the neglect of duty. Private ethics are not the issue; the lack of public service ethics is.

When a politician uses public money to cover up private affairs, when he uses the public service to accommodate his clandestine private arrangements or his political influence, grace and favour to cover private indiscretions, these matters are of public interest, even if, strictly speaking, the law has not been broken.

Such cases are not about prurient puritans who want to drag the private into the public sphere. They’re about opportunists who use the State to bankroll their private adventures.

It happens so often that we should take every opportunity to discourage it. We, the public and the press, let ourselves down when we don’t.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

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