It’s criminal! Sarkozy’s prison diary is 100 per cent pure jambon
For many, Christmas is a time for ham, and arguably the most prime jambon of 2025 has been served up by Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president-turned-briefly-prisoner.Sarkozy, who began a five-year sentence in October for criminal conspiracy, has now published a book about it called The Diary of a Prisoner, which arrives just in time for a dramatic hate reading round the fire in the style of Christmas’s most appalling round robin letters. In any case, Monsieur ultimately spent 20 days in prison before being released on appeal. You serve longer for Dry January. Nevertheless, it is 216 pages long, which works out to just under 11 pages per day. Fair play to the man for knocking out a book in that time, let alone one harrowingly written at a “small plywood table”. “I had never felt a harder mattress, not even during my military service,” he writes of the prison bedding. “The pillows were made of a strange material, perhaps plastic, and the blankets were blankets in name only.” Thus spake a man who has never stayed at a budget hotel. Also, a man with a word count to fill.Indeed, from the day he was sent down, Sarkozy has managed his “prison era” in the manner of a superstar who has seen Les Misérables one too many times. He said he would take two books with him into prison: a biography of Jesus by Jean-Christian Petitfils and The Count of Monte Cristo, which the BBC described with immaculate deadpan as “Alexandre Dumas’s classic story of a man wrongly imprisoned who escapes to wreak vengeance on his prosecutors.”“With unwavering strength, I tell [France] it is not a former president they are locking up this morning – it is an innocent man,” he posted on X on the morning he went to prison. “Do not feel sorry for me, because my wife and my children are by my side,” he added, as the strains of One Day More began to build, “but this morning I feel deep sorrow for a France humiliated by a will for revenge... I have no doubt. Truth will prevail. But how crushing the price will have been.” No wonder a hundred or so French lined the streets calling “Nicolas!” as his motorcade drove him through the two arrondissements to La Santé prison. When something this theatrical happens, you feel subconsciously drawn into the choreography.‘Thus spake a man who has never stayed at a budget hotel. Also, a man with a word count to fill and only 20 days of prison to fill it with’ (AP)Nor is this Sarko’s first foray in taking a short order and jambon-ing it up a bit. The former president, a respectable 5ft 5in tall, was nevertheless alleged to have arranged photo opportunities where the only people allowed to stand within shot were required to be around his height. At the Faurecia factory in Normandy in 2009, he stood before the cameras, flanked by white-coated workers and suited executives, very few of whom stood taller than him. A media furore ensued after the Belgian TV network RTBF interviewed an employee who said she had been asked to join him on stage precisely because she was shorter than him.But I digress. Just as Jean Valjean did before him, Sarkozy prayed. “It came naturally. I stayed like that for several minutes,” he wrote. “I prayed for the strength to bear the cross of this injustice.” What makes Sarkozy’s incarnation as Man Wronged harder to swallow is that, far from being imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread, it was for allowing “close collaborators” and “unofficial intermediaries” to obtain funding from the Libyan war criminal Colonel Gaddafi for his election campaign. Before Sarkozy, the last French leader to be imprisoned was Philippe Petain, the Nazi collaborator who was jailed for treason in 1945. However much you may baulk at coughing up for a ghostwritten celebrity novel to put under the tree, at least you can’t say that about them.Still, the best round robins are always from the most oblivious people. And evidently, nobody is more oblivious than cher Nicolas.
