I am interested in Nicolas Sarkozy’s bottom. No, really. I would like to compare its height, firmness and bounciness with the bottom of Crown Prince Felipe of Spain. Is it “impossibly round and high”, for instance, or disappointingly flat? We could chuck in Joachim Sauer’s posterior – he is Germany’s first husband – and maybe even that of our own dear Gordon Brown and play a sort of pan-European version of “whose butt?”, awarding points not only on the actual buttocks but also on their sartorial cladding.

We could even speculate about the underwear housing said bottoms: which European leader/male bit of royalty might wear cheek-boosting wonderpants, for instance. (My money would be on Sarkozy, with Silvio Berlusconi a close second. Actually, no – Berlusconi puts me more in mind of the old posing pouch, for some reason, possibly in leatherette.)

Too silly? I don’t see why. Acres of newsprint and media commentary were expended last week on the “battle of the bottoms”. Nobody appeared to think this was especially silly since the bottoms happened to be female and belonged to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and Princess Letizia of Spain.

The pair were photographed last week – from behind, climbing some steps, during the French president’s first state visit to Spain – and a thousand headlines instantly bloomed.

Minxy old Carla, 41, has apparently “met her match” in the pulchritudinous, pert-bottomed, 36-year-old Letizia. Because, obviously, Bruni wakes up every morning, in the manner of Snow White’s evil stepmother, and asks herself whether hers is still the fairest Euro-bottom of them all. The question probably keeps her awake at night, I shouldn’t wonder.

Multilingual and sharp as a tack, Bruni may think of herself as “a serious person” who has opinions on, for example, Berlusconi (when he “humorously” remarked that Barack Obama was “always tanned”, Carla said: “Sometimes I am very happy that I have become French”).

She may be vocal in her criticism of France’s failures when it comes to offering black and North African immigrants equal job opportunities, and she may speak out against sexual violence in Africa and for the 300,000 women who have been raped in the Congo – but hey, we all know what she’s like really: a silly, giddy former model, ergo thick, competitive arm-candy and bottom-fixated to boot.

I rather love Carla, although I appreciate that many don’t. A Becky Sharp character, in real life as in fiction, is always going to be a great deal more appealing and interesting than the wet flannel political spouse, who never says anything and who is boring to look at. Carla can’t help the way she looks, even though she works the look like the pro she is.

Being decorative is one thing: I’m happy that Carla wears John Galliano’s finest and doesn’t slob around in jogging bottoms and I like looking at her beautiful, knowing face. What I object to is the idea, so widely disseminated in the media last week, that adult women – you, me, princesses and political consorts – are so pathetic, so uninteresting, so completely tragic and brain-dead, that they view all other women through the prism of demented competitiveness and might be deflated and made distressed by the idea that someone they meet has a better bottom than them. Not a better brain, or a better job, or a nicer life but – a better bottom. By which criterion the Sarkozys’ state visit to Spain will have been ruined for Carla because of Letizia’s buttocks.

This, and the reasoning behind it, is so bonkersly old-fashioned that I hardly know what to say – except to remark on how antediluvian our approach to women in the public eye is, remains and will, depressingly, continue to remain for decades to come, probably.

The fact is that the only women in positions of power whom we can easily tolerate are a) in some way freakish, like Margaret Thatcher, who didn’t strike anyone as being immediately recognisably female; b) completely unthreatening and almost bloke-like in their inattention to grooming – Clare Short and Shirley Williams, for example; c) mouse-like and compliant, the opposite of threatening – Norma Major and so on; or d) all new and exciting, like Michelle Obama, who is fascinating, especially if you’re someone who doesn’t actually know any black people (this last is never talked about, but it’s central to white Europeans’ almost anthropological interest in her).

You can try being physically attractive and vocal, by all means, but it isn’t going to get you anywhere except onto the front pages of the tabloids, which will ignore everything you say and run entire features about your arse instead.

Thus I find myself in the strange position of pitying the rich, powerful, beautiful, clever, probably-not-very-nice-but-never-mind Bruni. I suspect she worked hard to get to be France’s first lady and I expect she may be discovering that it’s not all she thought it might be.

Like all beautiful women – go on, name me four exceptions – she is a victim of her looks, doomed to be defined by them for eternity, or until she becomes wrinkly and we all express our horror at the ruination of her face. Then she’ll have work done and we’ll all say a woman in the public eye should be allowed to age gracefully and what a shame it is. Or she won’t have work done and we’ll moan that a woman in the public eye should really try to keep things looking appetising for as long as possible and what a shame it is.

She can’t win. Nothing she says or does, no matter how carefully thought out, will ever stop people obsessing about her bottom, or her dresses, or her pout.

I’m not claiming this is wholly unwelcome: it’s nice, after all, to be considered attractive. However, I’m sure this is why unusually good-looking women still retreat into the old tried-and-tested career choice of some form of show business: they know that showbiz, unlike the real world, will reward them for their looks rather than punish them. And then it will eat them up and spit them out, of course, but that’s another story.

+ Mensa has a new member: Elise Tan Roberts, 2, who apparently has an IQ of 156, can name 35 capital cities, recognise three types of triangle, spell her name and recite the alphabet. I’ve always had my doubts about Mensa – it seems so incredibly naff to join a society to let everyone know how brainy you are – and this story rather confirms them, because it is unintelligent in the extreme to stigmatise a toddler in this way and in doing so turn her into a sort of circus freak.

Three points, observed over 16 years of being a parent: one, the age at which your child learns to read, or spell, or walk, makes absolutely no difference. Everyone who is healthy learns to do these things in the end and when you’re looking for your scholarship to Oxford, the fact that you could read fluently at three is completely irrelevant: you’re 18 now and everyone else can read, too.

Two: there don’t exist many stories about “child geniuses” that have happy endings – au contraire. Three: we all know that young children have very malleable brains and can learn pretty much anything their parents chuck at them. This is the equivalent of training your dog to do party tricks. Toddlers don’t need to be able to tell their isosceles from their right angle – they need to run around with jammy faces, making friends and getting messy.

I think Elise’s story is supposed to provoke admiration. I just feel really sorry for her.

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