Sex, truth and that videotape: Nothing to see here, says Macron

We’ve all been there. You post an innocent sex tape, intended purely for the object of your affections, and then for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with you, it ends up in the hands of a publicity-crazed Russian artist who once nailed his own scrotum to a paving stone in Red Square.

I mean, what are the chances of that?

In retrospect, it is probably just as well that Benjamin Griveaux, Emmanuel Macron’s choice to be mayor of Paris, got caught out before polling day. Had he won and then been exposed as, well, exposed, the President, unlike everybody else, wouldn’t have known where to look.

As it happens, l’Affaire Griveaux, as distinct from l’Affaire Benalla (the one in which the Élysée’s head of security dressed up as a policeman to beat up anti-government protesters) is not necessarily the worst thing to have happened to Macron in recent months. He has already found a new candidate for the mayoralty – Agnès Buzyn, formerly the health minister, a mumsy figure who until Monday lunchtime was leading France’s fight against the coronavirus.

Buzyn has thrown herself into the race with commendable brio and and in the apparent belief that she may actually pull it off.

“The bad can sometimes give rise to the good,” Stanislas Guerini, a leading member of the campaign team, told reporters, to the sound, one imagines, of whistling in the dark. “The collective is much stronger now. There is a new feeling in the air.”

Meanwhile, the President’s rediscovered distaste for Vladimir Putin, articulated over the weekend when he reversed his mid-term judgement that the Russian leader was someone he could do business with, has acquired new and unexpected credibility.

Piotr Pavlenski, the Russian dissident accused of posting Griveaux’s self-regarding video, was for several years a prominent critic of the Putin regime. Not only did he engage in testicular performance art, he also cut off his ear to protest the detention of fellow dissidents and set fire to the front doors of the Lubyanka, Moscow’s second-most iconic building after the Kremlin itself.

Yet, along with his equally outgoing girlfriend, Alexandra de Taddeo, he was allowed to go into exile in Paris, where, a little more than two years later, he is at the centre of a political storm that threatens to derail Macron’s attempts to win back City Hall.

Is all of this linked, or even orchestrated? Is it coincidence that Russia’s normally harsh judicial system gave Pavlenski the option of leaving the Motherland without first spending ten years in the Gulag? Did the Kremlin send him to Paris as a sleeper, charged with doing dirt on whichever French leader might emerge to smear Putin’s image abroad?

Nobody knows – though the artist has promised further lurid revelations. But, unsurprisingly, suspicion is rife and the knives are out. Today, the Paris prosecutor’s office opened a judicial inquiry into what happened. Pavlenski and De Taddeo, who had already been served by Griveaux’s lawyers with invasion of privacy, have been placed in police custody and are likely to face criminal charges.

Strangely – or not so strangely, you might think – the French press has not gone overboard on the affair. The video and the fallout have been widely reported, but without the gleeful brio that would attend such an event in the UK. If anything, reporters and their editors seem more concerned with the implications for Franco-Russian relations and who now gets to be mayor of Paris. The same goes for politicians of all parties, not just Macron’s own La République en Marche. It would appear that the sight, on video, of Grimeaux, a married man, masturbating is regarded as no more than a boyish prank that, while embarrassing and less than conducive to marital stability, need not be a career-ender.

We shall see.

For Macron, the key to surviving this latest of a series of unfortunate events is to put it behind him as quickly as possible while leaving Agnès Buzyn to take on not only Hidalgo and the centre-right candidate Rachida Dati, but also Cédric Villani, a former Macronist who fell out with the President and is bent on splitting the En Marche vote.

On a personal level, the Griveaux business has been a serious blow to Macron. The two men, born within weeks of each other, have worked closely since the earliest days of En Marche. As soon as the new liberal government, “neither Left nor Right,” was established, Griveaux – newly elected to the National Assembly – was given a key role in the heart of the Finance ministry, reporting back to the Élysée on what was going on and who was to blame. As President and Mayor of Paris, the two would have symbolised a new France, with a new Paris at its heart.

But events, dear boy, events. The French municipal elections, due to take place in the middle of next month, are crucial to Macron’s long-term survival. En Marche can afford to drop seats, but it cannot afford to crash out, most obviously in the capital. Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist incumbent, was always going to be hard to dislodge. Though her party is in the doldrums, she is regarded as hard-working and competent and, thus far, is untouched by scandal. Rachida Dati, a former justice minister, nurtured by Nicholas Sarkozy, is another tough cookie, while Villani could steal thousands of much-needed votes.

All hangs now on the performance over the next four weeks of Agnès Buzyn, a leading hematologist and former university professor, whose parents survived Auschwitz. Dr Buzyn (57) is married to the son of Simone Veil, another Holocaust survivor, who went on to be a government minister and President of the European Parliament and was interred in the Panthéon as a hero of France. Though she has brought renewed gusto to the campaign, she has much to do if she is to overcome both the internal vicissitudes of En Marche and the impact on public sentiment of both the gilets-jaunes and ongoing public sector strikes.

As for Griveaux, the next 12 months are likely to prove difficult in the extreme. While it seems unfair to criticise Macron for placing his faith in a man prepared to send a video of himself in solitary flagrante to a woman not his wife – a likelihood of which it can safely be said the President was ignorant – for the former would-be mayor the way back, if attempted, is unlikely to be by way of the Elysée.

At least Boris Johnson wasn’t proposing Andrew Sabisky to be mayor of London.