Last September​ Nicolas Sarkozy was found guilty of criminal conspiracy. He went through the gates of La Santé prison in Paris a few weeks later. The judge found that in 2005 he had approved an agreement between his political aides and the Gaddafi regime for massive cash transfers from Libya into his campaign coffers for his crack at the presidency in 2007. Seven other people were sentenced for their part in the same conspiracy, but Sarkozy’s removal to La Santé was an extraordinary moment in France’s postwar history, even though he was inside for less than three weeks.

In 2011, Sarkozy led the call for a Nato assault on Libya, having prepared the ground by recognising the rebel National Transitional Council. Libyan state media responded by threatening to reveal a ‘serious’ secret about the financing of Sarkozy’s presidential campaign. Gaddafi also told Le Figaro that he had helped Sarkozy come to power: ‘He asked us for a sum, we gave him the sum.’ (This remark, unpublished at the time, was revealed much later.) In March 2011, the TV network Euronews interviewed Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam. ‘The first thing we ask of this clown Sarkozy,’ he said, ‘is that he repay this money to the Libyan people. We helped him become president so that he would help the Libyan people but he has disappointed us.’ Three days later the first Tomahawk cruise missiles struck strategic assets across Libya. By the end of October, Gaddafi had been dragged from hiding and put to an ignominious death. His departure was followed by a violent struggle between rival Libyan factions, a surge of Libyan light weapons into the Sahel, and an increase in the herding of African migrants into detention centres in Libya, from which they were released at extortionate cost to their families, to try their luck in the Mediterranean.

Had Sarkozy championed Nato intervention to reduce his exposure to new revelations from Tripoli? There were rumours in Libya that Gaddafi’s murder had been set up by a French secret service agent. Not everyone in France dismissed these as conspiracy theories, but the larger worry was foreign interference in an election: the Libyan financing affair remains the defining intrigue among several that plunged Sarkozy into a nightmare of investigations, as his conduct in and out of office came under scrutiny. Nearly fifteen years after leaving the Élysée, he is stuck on a ghost train as one spectre after another looms up from his past. Gaunt but implacable, he continues to haunt the media with protestations of his innocence.

Over the years the French prosecutors have not let up, though the appeal courts have bought him time. Incarcerated last October, Sarkozy was freed in November pending an appeal, and photographed jogging on a Caribbean beach in December. But he’s not off the hook: if the appeal fails, he will still have four years and eleven months to serve. In his prison diary, his latest attempt at self-exculpation, he tells us he was overcome with relief when the courts agreed to hear his appeal, which he took as proof of his blamelessness. But that’s not obvious to his readers: Sarkozy is still entangled in a skein of allegations and his efforts to cut himself free have inflicted collateral damage on the French political class.

The charges against him relate to periods before and after his presidential term. For years politicians had taken it for granted that they could profit from the grey economy of French politics. Sarkozy’s mistake was to take it too far. He was unable to spot the difference between generating wealth and prestige for France as a ‘dynamic’ statesman and stashing cash for his own projects, as he’d done at the start of his political career in the 1980s. Sarkozy continues to claim as a mark in his favour that ‘nobody understands’ the Libyan financing affair.

He’s right that many of the facts, let alone the legal technicalities, are arcane. But the background is deeper and less convoluted than it suits him to acknowledge: the Libyan funding investigation has reopened an old wound – the explosion of a bomb on a French passenger jet flying over Niger in 1989. All 170 people on UTA Flight 772 were killed; 54 of them were French. The previous year, another device had brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie. Both attacks were carried out with the connivance of Libyan intelligence. At the time Sarkozy was the energetic mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, a wealthy suburb of Paris: he bounced out the centre-right candidate for whom he had been campaigning and stood in his place. Sarkozy was a partner in a successful law firm; he had recently been elected as a member of the Assemblée Nationale. He was an unabashed ultra-market liberal; ruthless, good in debate, full of himself – someone to watch.

In 1994, France signed a contract for the sale of three submarines to Pakistan. The deal was all but finalised during Mitterrand’s last days as president. The prime minister at the time was Édouard Balladur, a centre-right politician in a divided political estate: a socialist was hanging on to the presidency but parliament had been lost to his opponents. (This uneasy compromise between an executive of one persuasion and a parliamentary majority of another is known in France as ‘cohabitation’.) During his tenure, Balladur groomed a number of political yearlings, among them Sarkozy, whom he rewarded with the post of budget minister.

Balladur had chaperoned the Pakistan contract through its early stages. It was greased by French sovereign loans to Islamabad and generous commissions to negotiators, lobby groups, defence companies and politicians in both countries. The kickbacks, including Balladur’s, were brokered by Ziad Takieddine, a wealthy Franco-Lebanese businessman who had good connections in Libya and Saudi Arabia; he was familiar with senior French politicians of the centre right. He was a dab hand at breaking down large transfers of money into inconspicuous flows and ferrying them across jurisdictions, managing this not only for the Pakistan deal but for two defence contracts with Saudi Arabia, one for the sale of French frigates, another for border surveillance technology.

The contract for the frigates moved forward, but the border surveillance deal stalled. There was also trouble ahead for the Pakistan deal when Balladur decided to run against Jacques Chirac, the obvious centre-right candidate for the presidency, in 1995. Balladur, who had picked Sarkozy as his campaign spokesperson, failed to make it to the second round, but his betrayal was noted. It later transpired that 10.25 million francs in cash (about €1.6 million in 2002, when France abandoned the franc) had turned up in his campaign chest three days after he was eliminated. Was that a payment by Takieddine? Had it failed to arrive in time, or wouldn’t it have made a difference anyway? According to Libération, Takieddine had been in Geneva two days earlier to withdraw the same sum from one of his many accounts.

Chirac won the presidency and within months the government made a one-off disbursement of roughly half the monies outstanding to profiteers from the submarine contract. Takieddine’s programme had been derailed and Balladur was out of pocket, as Chirac had intended. In May 2002, as Chirac was re-elected to a second term, a bomb killed eleven French engineers on a bus near a naval dockyard in Karachi, where they were working with their Pakistani counterparts. The attack was carried out by a jihadist franchise, probably al-Qaida, but a report by a former intelligence staffer at the French Ministry of the Interior concluded that the killers were sponsored by senior Pakistani stakeholders in the submarine contract who felt shortchanged and decided the time had come to teach Chirac a lesson.

Through all this, Sarkozy kept his eyes on the presidency, distancing himself from Balladur’s fratricidal gambit and recasting himself as a Chirac supporter. Chirac appointed him minister of the interior. As a former Balladur protégé, Sarkozy already had the hang of promiscuous campaign funding and once in office set about reviving the border security deal with the Saudis. It wasn’t long before Chirac suspected that Sarkozy was working from the Balladur playbook and meant to fund a bid for the presidency with defence kickbacks. He responded by bringing the Saudi dossier inside the Élysée, where it languished.

In 2004 Chirac’s foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, announced that the Gaddafi Foundation – the supreme leader’s charity – would compensate families of the victims of the UTA bombing to the tune of $170 million. (Gaddafi also compensated families whose relatives died in the Pan Am bombing.) That same year, Gaddafi welcomed UN inspectors to Libya to begin dismantling his stockpiles of mustard gas and precursor chemicals, and Chirac visited Tripoli to clear the way for future commercial ties – infrastructure, tourism, aviation.

The prospect of contracts in Libya seems to have intrigued Sarkozy. In October 2005 he made a visit of his own to Tripoli, in his capacity as minister of the interior; like Chirac, he met with Gaddafi. Ahead of him he sent Claude Guéant, a senior civil servant at the Ministry of the Interior. In December Sarkozy’s old friend from Neuilly, Brice Hortefeux, who held a junior cabinet post, also visited Libya. It wasn’t clear at this stage what was under discussion. In 2006 Sarkozy asked Guéant to run his presidential campaign.

On the night of Sarkozy’s victory in May 2007, he waved to delirious crowds in the Salle Gaveau, where Johnny Hallyday anointed him as ‘a man of honour’ who loved his family and would never betray his country. The party rocked on from one venue to another. Sarkozy was more amusing, more cocksure than he’d been as a cabinet minister. Unlike many of his predecessors, he wasn’t a top-drawer technocrat. He behaved that night like a feisty contestant who had won a TV game show.

In his first year​ in office Sarkozy was frenetic. He paid a second visit to Libya to applaud the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, imprisoned by Gaddafi on the grounds that they’d infected children in a Libyan paediatric hospital with HIV. The European Commission and the Bulgarian government had been edging towards a deal on their release for eight years. But Sarkozy had already opened separate negotiations, perhaps during his visit in 2005. His second wife, Cécilia, went ahead to do the honours and leave with the nurses on a French charter flight (was she the ‘new Lady Di?’, Le Figaro wondered; she and Sarkozy split up soon afterwards). Guéant and Sarkozy followed her to Tripoli, tying up loose ends and exploring their rapprochement with Gaddafi. In return for the hostage release, money flowed to Libya, from the Bulgarian government and the EC, and surely from France too, but this is opaque (at least to me). In December 2007 Sarkozy welcomed Gaddafi and his retinue of four hundred to Paris. They pitched their vast tent in the garden of the Hôtel de Marigny by the Élysée Palace, where it remained for five days.

The first suspicions that Sarkozy might have overstepped the mark on campaign funding emerged in 2010 – three years into his term – when the press reported that Liliane Bettencourt, the elderly heiress to the L’Oréal fortune, had been persuaded to give a large sum to Sarkozy’s party treasurer. The judiciary opened an investigation into the affair. There was no suggestion at the time of Sarkozy taking Libyan funding. But then, in 2011, Takieddine was detained at an airport near Paris with €1.5 million in cash. It was a rare moment of misfortune for an intermediary who was good at covering his tracks. Since the arms deals with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, he had become a reliable, astonishingly wealthy point man with a portfolio of international properties, including a £17 million house in West London. It was days after Takieddine’s arrest, with the Nato intervention in Libya all but inevitable, that Gaddafi and his son went public about their conversations with Sarkozy’s emissaries in Tripoli.

In the spring of 2012, the online journal Mediapart published a leaked memo, dated 2006, from a Libyan intelligence officer to Gaddafi’s chief of staff. It confirmed that €50 million had been earmarked by the Libyan treasury for Sarkozy’s presidential campaign. According to the memo, the agreement had been made in the presence of Takieddine and Hortefeux. The story sent French editors and news anchors back to Sarkozy’s visits to Libya and Gaddafi’s ostentatious stay in Paris. Attention then turned to the fixers: Guéant had spent decades in the shadows, tweaking postcolonial policy in Africa to France’s advantage; Hortefeux was a mediocre politician who covered his incompetence by taking a hard line on immigration – and Gaddafi had explained more than once that he held the key to migrant departures from north-east Africa. The deal that Sarkozy had in mind during his 2005 visit to Tripoli, which was bookended by visits from Guéant and Hortefeux, appeared in retrospect to be roughly as follows. Were Sarkozy to win the presidency in 2007 he would double down on Chirac’s efforts and consolidate Gaddafi’s return to the international fold after years as a pariah. Contracts that had been blocked since the plane bombings – in defence and nuclear energy above all – would be reviewed; migrant flows across the Mediterranean would be addressed. In return Gaddafi would throw money – a lot of money – at Sarkozy’s campaign.

Sarkozy sued Mediapart on the basis that the memo was a forgery. A separate, unanswered question, when Mediapart went public, was whether or not Guéant and Hortefeux had met with Gaddafi’s brother-in-law, Abdullah al-Senussi, a senior Libyan intelligence officer who masterminded the downing of UTA 772. These meetings led to an abiding suspicion that Sarkozy had sold out the victims of the bombing, and this in turn revived anxieties about the deaths of the French engineers in Karachi in 2002. Senussi had been stuck in Libya since 1999, when France condemned him in absentia to life imprisonment. By 2005 he was ill and needed treatment abroad but a French arrest warrant made this impossible. Did Gaddafi press Guéant and Hortefeux to ask Sarkozy to lift the warrant or grant a presidential pardon? Quite possibly, but at this stage it was impossible to prove. Mediapart’s memo remained as evidence, but after several forensic examinations, Sarkozy’s lawyers are alone in denying its authenticity. Fake or not, the document is no longer relevant: the prosecution case against Sarkozy’s criminal conspiracy is based on a wealth of separate evidence and the fact that his bagmen in Libya met with Senussi has been established by the courts.

By the end of 2012, with Gaddafi dead, the Libyan intervention done and dusted and Sarkozy no longer in office, public interest in his Libyan connection was briefly in abeyance. But the investigation into the Bettencourt affair had been edging forward and before the year was out Sarkozy appeared as a person of interest at preliminary hearings. Within weeks, Libya was centre stage again when the judiciary confirmed that statements taken from Takieddine after his arrest would lead to a new inquiry into Sarkozy’s foreign campaign funding. It opened in April 2013. Sarkozy was not named at this early stage, but there were now two potentially damaging cases that his lawyers had to manage. Worse was to come when the judge in the Bettencourt case ruled that Sarkozy was no longer a person of interest but a suspect. The charge was ‘exploitation’ of a vulnerable person. Sarkozy’s lawyers sweated it out and in October 2013 he was cleared – the axe fell instead on her manipulative retainers. Meanwhile investigations continued into the Libyan affair.

And a new storm was gathering around financial improprieties during Sarkozy’s 2012 presidential campaign as the incumbent, which he lost to François Hollande. At the end of that year, France’s commission on campaign funding rejected the accounts that Sarkozy’s party managers had submitted. France allows presidential campaigns to reclaim 47.5 per cent of their costs from the state, provided they take more than 5 per cent of the vote. It also sets a ceiling on campaign expenditure for the second round at €22.5 million. Sarkozy’s accountants submitted a figure that came in just under the ceiling, but the commission’s breakdown suggested that the total expenditure was beyond the legal limit. The case went to court, where the overspend was eventually revealed to be between €17 and €20 million – the exact figure was hard to ascertain.

Sarkozy may have been relieved by the judgment in the Bettencourt case, but he had yet to see what the other investigations would turn up. He and his lawyer Thierry Herzog needed to prime an insider who could supply information about both. This person would, if possible, sort out a further snag: the police had seized Sarkozy’s diaries during the Bettencourt investigation and hung onto them. Sarkozy must have worried (or known) that they contained compromising material about Libya. Herzog settled on Gilbert Azibert, a friend of his and a former judge, as a pliable informant: together Herzog and Sarkozy would persuade Azibert to keep them abreast of developments and, if possible, retrieve the diaries. Assuming correctly that there was a wiretap on their calls, Herzog set up two smartphones under a pseudonym, in the belief that this would allow him to talk to Sarkozy out of earshot of the police, and proceeded to sweet-talk Azibert. In return for his services, Azibert was to be given an honorary post in Monaco. Sarkozy went to Monaco intending to set up the arrangement, but got cold feet at the last moment. We know all this because the police were tapping Herzog’s other two phones. And so, in 2014, Sarkozy became the focus of yet another criminal investigation, along with Herzog and their biddable magistrate, on grounds of ‘influence peddling’ and – potentially – corruption of the judiciary.

An interlude followed as the police and the prosecutor’s office pored over reams of evidence. It was a moment of respite for the French public: as one revelation followed another, the fantastic web of allegations against Sarkozy was, as he persisted in saying, hard to make sense of. France was reeling in 2015 after two jihadist atrocities – the Charlie Hebdo attack and the Bataclan massacre – and Sarkozy’s brief absence from the front pages was no bad thing for the country’s political institutions. Media coverage of his chequered past was contributing to a contagious public cynicism about due process and republican governance. But he wasn’t gone for long. In the summer of 2016, after years deliberating Mediapart’s Libyan memo, the courts threw out Sarkozy’s challenge to its authenticity. His lawyers began an appeal. Finally, in 2018, after a painstaking investigation into ‘illegal funding of an electoral campaign’, he was named as a person of interest to the judiciary in the Libyan affair. A milder blow was delivered the following year when the Cour de Cassation – the highest court of appeal in France – found no objection to the lower appeal court’s ruling that Sarkozy’s suit against Mediapart was baseless.

The investigation into Takieddine, meanwhile, had been moving forward at a snail’s pace. Takieddine was a mercurial witness with a sense of entitlement and powerful connections; he was prone to fits of rage under questioning from journalists and police. He could denounce his former business associates one day and assert their innocence the next, but in a press interview in 2016, he shopped Sarkozy and Guéant by insisting that he’d delivered a total of €5 million in cash to them in Paris for Sarkozy’s first presidential run. In June 2020, the French courts sentenced Takieddine to five years for his role in illegal transfers of money connected to the Pakistan submarine contract: an indication that the net was tightening on Sarkozy. Takieddine skipped the country, but in the autumn he was tracked down in Beirut by Paris-Match and BFMTV for an interview, in which he performed an eloquent about-turn and claimed that Gaddafi had never given a centime to Sarkozy’s campaign. The judiciary suspected the interview had been set up in return for a handsome payment to Takieddine, as a last-ditch effort to save Sarkozy from jail.

The trial of Sarkozy, Herzog and Azibert – based on the evidence gleaned from the wiretapped phones – opened in November 2020 after a six-year inquiry. The following March all three were sentenced to three years in prison with two years suspended, for influence-peddling and corruption. Sarkozy’s lawyers lodged an appeal, hoping to save their client from a spell behind bars. In May he went on trial again, for the illegal campaign funding he’d covered up during his second presidential campaign. For this he copped one year in jail, which he could serve at home, with a tag. Yet again he appealed. In July state prosecutors began looking into Takieddine’s volte-face in Paris-Match: they were concerned that a key witness in the Libyan affair had been suborned to obstruct the course of justice. They called in Sarkozy’s third and current wife, Carla Bruni, for questioning.

In 2023, Sarkozy’s appeal against the wiretap verdict was denied; his lawyers referred the ruling to the Cour de Cassation. In 2024 a lower appeal court upheld the judgment in the illegal campaign funding case, but halved Sarkozy’s sentence to six months with a tag. He kept up his assiduous jogging routine, and could be seen on YouTube pounding along a cobbled street in Paris, wearing a tracksuit: you couldn’t spot the tag. In the spring he was released on grounds of age: he was 69. He had got off lightly, but the images of the serene convict, jogging the primrose path to what he hoped was full exoneration, were misleading.

Much was at stake here for the judiciary, whom Sarkozy had long antagonised – first as an abrasive minister of the interior and then as a head of state who pushed through minimum sentences for repeat offenders. The judges believed Sarkozy had always sought to undermine their independence. In his view – especially later, in his memoir – the edifice of the law had been captured by the left and had ceased to be impartial. Sending a former president to jail might have left the judges at the mercy of political enemies who would denounce the separation of powers as a puppet show and the verdict as a settling of old scores. A not guilty verdict would have driven public confidence in the system to new lows. In December 2024, after long deliberation, the Cour de Cassation rejected Sarkozy’s appeal in the wiretap case. He announced he would take his case to the European Court of Human Rights, and on he sailed, from one recourse to the next, until the verdict went against him on the Libyan finance affair.

Prison literature​ is a rich field of study. Bunyan started writing The Pilgrim’s Progress during a twelve-year stint in Bedfordshire County Prison. Other illustrious jailbirds produced extraordinary texts during or after periods in prison, from Boethius to François Villon to Wilde. Gramsci embarked on his Prison Notebooks in a Puglia jail at the start of his twenty-year sentence; they stuttered to a halt when he was transferred, in poor health, to a clinic near Rome. Jean Genet drafted two of his novels, Our Lady of the Flowers and Miracle of the Rose, when he was jailed for several years in the 1940s for petty larceny. He was one of Sarkozy’s distinguished predecessors in La Santé, who also included Dreyfus, Apollinaire (fingered as an accessory to thefts from the Louvre in 1911) and Ahmed Ben Bella, who went on to become the first president of independent Algeria. And let’s not forget Guéant, who had little to say about the two months he served in La Santé in 2021-22 for an offence committed while Sarkozy’s chief of staff at the Ministry of the Interior: using a cash fund for the police to hand out bonuses to members of staff at the ministry and to cover his own personal expenses.

It’s tempting to compare Sarkozy’s diary to the three-volume memoir Jeffrey Archer wrote during the two years he served for perjury. But unlike Archer, Sarkozy doesn’t suffer from hypergraphia. Le Journal d’un prisonnier appeared three weeks after his release: surely the shortest turnaround in the history of prison memoirs. It was commissioned by Fayard, a publishing house that now belongs to the French media magnate Vincent Bolloré – net worth $10 billion and rising, a sponsor of Marine Le Pen’s party – who is sweeping away the vestiges of Republican press freedom while replacing editors and staff who kick up a fuss. Bolloré is a powerful advocate for Sarkozy outside the courtroom.

Sarkozy’s descriptions of a tiny cell with a window onto a wall are sobering: he was held in solitary confinement, in case an inmate seized an opportunity to settle old scores. The thousands of letters he received from loyal fans, he tells us, revived his spirits. He uses the book to attack his detractors – Mediapart in particular – praise his supporters and apologise to those he’d forgotten to acknowledge. They include Jared Kushner’s father, Charles, now Trump’s ambassador to France. In one hasty passage, Sarkozy remembers to doff his cap to Kushner Sr after politely declining his offer of a visit in prison, which Sarkozy’s lawyers believed might compromise his appeal. They had a point: Kushner is an indicted crook who plea-bargained his way out of jail in the US in 2005 for multiple offences and hired a sex worker to compromise his own brother-in-law.

Sarkozy received support from Chirac’s wife and words of succour on the phone from Marine Le Pen and Javier Milei’s man in Argentina’s Paris embassy. That Macron delegated the decision to strip Sarkozy of his Légion d’honneur to a minor dignitary in the order is a source of bitterness for Sarkozy, even though he describes himself as the mildest of men. ‘Bitterness has never been a mark of my character and never will be.’ Or: ‘I’m not someone who likes to complain … and never will be.’ But there is a grim reckoning of enemies and friends. Among the latter is Le Pen’s Rassemblement national, part of the right’s political family, he tells his readers. He urges followers of his erstwhile centre-right party to build the largest alliance possible, ‘without exclusion or anathema’, for next year’s presidential elections: a resounding call, in other words, to rally around Jordan Bardella – or Le Pen, if her appeal against her conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds is upheld and she’s allowed to run.

Sarkozy’s memoir is strewn with passages of self-extenuation, but there is also the defiant tone of the fighter. Now, he writes, he is prepared to ‘go to the limit’ to establish his ‘complete innocence’. His long offensive against the judiciary, which he persists in waging as a criminal suspect who imagines himself as a latter-day Dreyfus, has put judges at risk. They are accustomed to online abuse and real-time encounters with sworn enemies: diehard members of the gilets jaunes, for instance, or more often, crime cartels. Yet death threats against the judge who sent Sarkozy to La Santé last year led to new levels of alarm for her safety and a stern warning from Macron that the rule of law is the cornerstone of French democracy. Sarkozy, on the contrary, seems to believe his ordeal in the courts has proved that the rule of law is a sham. It’s a dangerous opinion, and one of many mafioso touches in the book, along with the schmaltzy memories of old friends, ingratiating praise for the Rassemblement national in the hope of being offered a pardon if its candidate wins in 2027, outright rejection of the charges against him, and cloying eulogies to his family, who bore their suffering heroically during his time in La Santé. We also learn that discussions with the prison chaplain have brought him closer to God. He drew solace from a passage from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:8): ‘Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’

Sarkozy looks older now​ and less sturdy. At the Paris appeal court last month he listened in silence to civil parties’ lawyers as they urged compensation for families of the UTA bombing victims. Does he still jog, I wondered, as he limped across during a recess to speak to a barrister for the plaintiffs. She turned her back before he could finish. He withdrew to confer with his defence team. His habit when president of shrugging during TV interviews has stayed with him. It once seemed like the gesture of a confident newcomer to the Élysée: take me as you find me, throw me out of office when you’re ready. In court the Sarkozy shrug has become a kind of optical telegraphy from a desperate man who feels he’s foundering in a bog of injustice.

The bereaved families have read the passages in his prison memoir where he argues that his diplomatic overture to Libya was a statesmanlike move. But as far as they’re concerned Sarkozy’s bagmen sat down in Tripoli twenty years ago to discuss a pardon for Gaddafi’s brother-in-law, an indicted murderer of their relatives. Dozens of family members were in court when I attended. So were a handful of their supporters from Air France, wearing distinctive Hermès scarves (UTA merged with Air France in the 1990s): some were old enough to remember members of flight crew who came down in Niger. It was their intention, I’m sure, that the gravity of the civil case would weigh on the appeal court’s decision in the matter of his criminal charges.

The killer blow against Sarkozy was delivered in April by Guéant, who had lost patience with Sarkozy’s testimony. Too sick to appear at the appeal hearings, he submitted a written statement about an exchange he says took place on 25 July 2007, when he and Sarkozy were in Tripoli. During a state banquet Gaddafi had again urged Sarkozy – just as his people had urged Chirac in 2004, and Guéant and Hortefeux in 2005 – to secure a pardon for Senussi. Guéant’s testimony states that Sarkozy relayed the gist of his conversation with Gaddafi, and asked: ‘Claude, look into that?’ The civil plaintiffs are happy to have it on record that Sarkozy once toyed with the idea of washing the blood from Senussi’s hands to fulfil his side of the bargain in return for a multi-million-euro bung. Senussi, who is 76, is being held in indefinite detention by the Libyan Government of National Unity for his role in a massacre in a Libyan jail in the 1990s and abuses committed against the insurgents during the Nato intervention.

For years Sarkozy’s lawyers have said, correctly, that no money from Libya has ever been traced to his 2007 campaign accounts. This is a tribute to Takieddine’s ingenuity with the transfers and Guéant’s as the end-receiver: he kept wads of euros in an enormous safe he claimed he’d rented to house Sarkozy’s priceless archive of letters, memos, policy drafts and speeches. (A few years later the absurdity of this claim became clear when the courts asked Sarkozy to resubmit the diaries that Azibert had returned to him after the Bettencourt inquiry and were told that he’d mislaid them.)

There is solid evidence that around €6 million left the Libyan treasury for Takieddine’s accounts in 2006 and that the first instalment arrived soon after Hortefeux’s visit to Tripoli in 2005. From there the trail goes cold. Nonetheless, the charge against Sarkozy is not that he received Libyan funds but that he conspired to do so. To which his lawyers respond that if they can’t be traced to his campaign accounts, the indictment for conspiracy doesn’t stand up. This argument failed to convince the criminal court last year and may not fare better with the appeal judges, who retired in May to deliberate the many submissions for and against the eight appellants, who include Guéant (sentenced to six years) and Hortefeux (two). A ruling is due in November, which leaves Sarkozy hanging by a thread. He could go back to prison, or if he’s lucky wear another tag – a lenient sentencing option which he scorned as minister of the interior. If the lawyers for the civil plaintiffs and the prosecution team have swayed the judges, his sentence may well be increased.

The Paris-Match interview with Takieddine in Beirut in 2020 is the subject of yet another judicial inquiry, after police accessed emails between Bruni and a team of influential friends who had set up the encounter, part of what they referred to as their ‘Save Sarko’ initiative. The public prosecutor’s office is now exploring what it suspects is a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. A new court case, if it happens, would be a blow for the Sarkozy family and their friends. Destiny makes fools of us all, Bruni sang in ‘Quelqu’un m’a dit’, ‘it gives us nothing and promises everything.’ Even so, destiny dealt the Save Sarko suspects one propitious card: if Takieddine had lived to testify in a new trial, he might have made another of his famous about-turns and revealed that they paid him handsomely for his interview. But he died in Beirut in 2025, at the age of 75, days before the criminal court sentenced Sarkozy and his fellow conspirators.

Sarkozy’s misdemeanours have played their part in the rightward shift in France’s political landscape. Old cockerels of the exhausted centre right still crow in his favour, but his more vigorous defenders on the extreme right are the ones voters are listening to. For them, Sarkozy can be invoked, when necessary, as a martyr of a broken justice system. During his presidency, the far right had nothing good to say for him, or he for it. Today he has thrown what remains of his weight behind the Rassemblement national and hopes to take his followers with him. How many is hard to say. In his book, he recalls stricken crowds lining his Via Dolorosa to La Santé and waving jubilantly when he was released. His prison memoir is reported to have sold more than 200,000 copies, as Bolloré’s media empire goes from strength to strength.