A lame-duck prime minister whose time looks to be running out; feuding and power-hungry personalities convulsing Government; ministerial reputations tarnished; the pervading sense that a long-running regime is reaching its end: not Britain, but France. If Tony Blair had a moment of contemplation during his various ministerial crises and gazed across the Channel, he might experience a frisson of Schadenfreude at seeing an adminis-tration in worse straits than his own.

The cause of its current troubles is a dirty tricks row involving France’s three most prominent politicians. The claim that Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, instructed a senior intelligence officer to investigate bribery claims against Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister and his presidential rival on the Right, is combustible. That he did so on the alleged prompting of Jacques Chirac is doubly explosive. A broad British parallel would involve Mr Blair prodding Charles Clarke to get MI5 to investigate the activities of Gordon Brown. M Chirac and M de Villepin have both denied the claims, made in court documents. And it has long been concluded that the linking of M Sarkozy to the long-running Clearstream corruption saga was bogus. But the effect has been to dent further the French Government’s credibility shortly after its humiliating climbdown in the face of demonstrations against modest labour reforms.

M Chirac’s woes are compounded by a book chronicling his presidency, which parts the veil of privacy that French writers have historically afforded their rulers and reveals to voters an unflattering, semi-tragic portrait of a president whose legacy is one of personal and political failure. Branding him “the undertaker of France’s decline”, the account, by a trusted figure in the Parisian journalistic establishment, pictures M Chirac as a broken man since his rebuff by French voters over the European constitution. The book, a bestseller, is in effect a political obituary a year before the presidential elections at which M Chirac is expected to bow out.

The developments call to mind the decay and political infighting that marked the end of François Mitterrand’s time in the Elysée Palace a decade ago — hardly a flattering comparison. Yet there is little to suggest an imminent change of direction. It suits M Sarkozy for M de Villepin to limp on. If he tried to finish off his badly wounded rival, he would merely succeed in promoting the interests of another potential competitor. There is no doubt that the victor in all this is the alleged victim, M Sarkozy, who is not averse to a little politicking himself. Meanwhile, the fractured Left is trying to regroup around Ségolène Royal, already the darling of the liberal set, if not of her own party.

The losers thus far have been the French, even if many of them have encouraged the Government in its economic ossification. The wider world also requires a strong, clear and coherent voice. Instead, M Chirac offers another year in which France and Europe’s priorities take second place to the vanities of a failing monarch.