Britons may grumble about the BBC, but across the Channel Nicolas Sarkozy has just made the venerable Auntie the model for a revamp of the sprawling public broadcasting system in France.

The British-inspired shake-up in state television and radio by the President is part of a pattern that is only now dawning on his country: Britain, the old rival whose free-market system was long deemed an anathema, has become the chief example for the relaunch of France. As Cabinet ministers travel to London to study British methods, the radical right-wing President has been importing British practices in bulk, especially those devised by his friend and hero, Tony Blair. These include creating British-style job centres, workfare schemes and employment contracts, and the adoption of selective immigration, CCTV surveillance and the management of sex offenders. He also wants an “Anglo-Saxon”-style cultural revolution for the Civil Service and education system, with performance-related pay and promotion.

Mr Sarkozy sent François Fillon, his Anglophile lieutenant who is now Prime Minister, to Downing Street for three days early in his election campaign. Mr Fillon, whose wife, Penny, is English, routinely enthuses over Britain’s “brilliant performance” in curbing unemployment with flexible labour practices.

“Nicolas Sarkozy dreams of becoming the Tony Blair of France,” said Challenges, a business magazine, commenting on the President’s “cutting and pasting” of new Labour policies by the President.

Laurent Joffrin, the editor of Libération, the left-wing daily, said that importing British ideas would not work, “any more than if we were asked to drive on the left and play cricket instead of pétanque”.

“Super-Sarko” has appointed Georges-Marc Benamou, an adviser, to rethink the state apparatus, starting with the overlapping external networks. “The BBC has the same funding as French external broadcasting but is much more visible and influential,” Mr Sarkozy said in his orders to Mr Benamou and his team.

As they were dispatched to London, Mr Sarkozy told Patrick de Carolis, the boss of France Télévisions, that he wanted his four channels, led by France 2, to be “more creative and daring”, citing the BBC as the model.

The first upshot will be a single corporation to rationalise the separate external networks, France 24, TV6 Monde and Radio France International, which cost about ¤400 million (£280 million) a year.

The unions believe that Mr Sarkozy will then seek to streamline domestic public broadcasting under a single, BBC-like entity. Mr Sarkozy’s zeal to emulate Britain ends a period when Scandinavian nations, Canada and Germany were the only acceptable models. The pragmatic President may still be something of an old-style protectionist, but he has never made a secret of his intense admiration for Mr Blair.

He took as his own motto Mr Blair’s formula that “what counts is what works”. In his campaign book he wrote that France’s partners had succeeded in changing without losing their identities. “The most dramatic case . . . is that of Britain,” he said. “London ceaselessly sucks in thousands of young French people, as if it was easier to succeed there than at home.”

Half a dozen ministers have been sent on study trips to London since Mr Sarkozy formed his government in May. The latest, Eric Besson, the Minister for Economic Planning and a dissident Socialist, returned last month from a visit to Gordon Brown’s strategy unit, struck by its open-plan office. Staff at French ministries work in separate offices with closed doors.

Mr Sarkozy’s team has drawn on the work of the Cercle d’outre- Manche (Cross-Channel Circle), a group of French business leaders who advocate British policies for France.

“We should take inspiration from Britain because it is a country fundamentally similar to France. What amazes the French most of all is Britain’s full employment,” said Arnaud Vaissié, the co-founder of the Circle.

“For a long time, they used to say that the British model was not applicable to France because the system of society was unacceptable. We are showing that this is false.”

He regrets that Britain, “out of arrogance and self-satisfaction”, does not make much effort to copy French ideas. France offers superior models for transport, nuclear energy and the health system, he said.

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