In a novelty for French politics, two examining judges kept Dominique de Villepin awake until after three o'clock this morning as they plied him relentlessly with questions about his role in the so-called Clearstream scandal.

Emerging into the cold, Mr de Villepin, 53, put the best face on his embarrassing marathon.

“I was very pleased to be able to testify on this matter, of which I have for many months been a victim of slander and lies,” he told reporters and TV crews who had waited since 9am on Thursday outside outside the Financial Crime Brigade on the Boulevard des Italiens.

Mr de Villepin had kept up his energy by doing push-ups in an empty office during a 10-minute evening break in his interrogation.

No Prime Minister in modern French history has been summoned by judges although Lionel Jospin, the Socialist premier, was briefly questioned in 2001 in his office over a party financing affair.

After two hours sleep Mr de Villepin was back on the steps of the Matignon mansion, his residence and office, to greet his 20 ministers for breakfast.

Among them was Nicolas Sarkozy, the deputy Prime Minister whose name had landed him in all the trouble.

While the Prime Minister was being grilled, Mr Sarkozy was in Bordeaux enjoying his effective coronation as presidential candidate for the governing Union for a Popular Majority in next April’s election.

Mr Sarkozy leads the party, but until earlier this year, President Chirac’s appointed Prime Minister hoped that he might challenge him for the nomination.

In Bordeaux, two of Mr Chirac’s former Prime Ministers and allies — Alain Juppé and Jean-Pierre Raffarin — declared their support for Mr Sarkozy. The President is expected soon to follow suit now that his protégé-Prime Minister has been all but eliminated from the political scene.

“On the same day that Nicolas Sarkozy was lifted up on high by the governing majority, Villepin was reduced to doing push-ups in the court’s antechamber,” noted Le Progrès de Lyon newspaper.

Mr de Villepin has not so far been charged with any offence in the
long-running saga, which involves the circulation of a bogus list of accounts at a Luxembourg financial institution called Clearstream.

The dozens of millions of pounds in the accounts were linked to bribes from the sale of French frigates to Taiwan in 1991. Among the names on the list was Mr Sarkozy.

In 2004, when Mr de Villepin was serving first as Foreign and then Interior Minister, he got wind of the list and launched two separate secret investigations without telling Mr Sarkozy, the Prime Minister or anyone else in the Cabinet.

Investigating judges became involved when they received an anonymous CD-Rom with the lists later that year.

Early last year, Mr Sarkozy, an adversary of President Chirac and Mr de Villepin found out about Mr de Villepin’s investigation and filed a formal complaint.

Furious that the Prime Minister had failed to tell him about the bogus list, he accused Mr de Villepin of trying to smear him. The Prime Minister has denied the allegations, saying that he had merely performed his ministerial duty in good faith.

Judges Jean-Marie d’Huy and Henri Pons have carried out searches and earlier questioned other senior figures, including Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Defence Minister.

The judges are known for their fondness of extra-long interviews. They often keep their witnesses until well into the night in the hope that they will crack — an old tradition in France’s inquisitorial justice system.

According to judicial leaks, the pair have failed in a quest to prove that Mr de Villepin had a hand in fabricating or circulating the Clearstream list or that Mr Chirac was involved.

Four men have been charged with spreading false accusations. They include Imad Lahoud, a computer expert and Jean-Louis Gergorin, a former vice-president of EADS, the parent company of Airbus, who is an old friend of Mr de Villepin.

The affair began when Mr Gergorin, an old friend of Mr de Villepin, brought the lists to the Prime Minister in January 2004.

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