Micheal Martin was speaking after a new opinion poll suggested a drop in support for the treaty.

Look through some property websites and you can see the advertisements: the phrase you are looking for is contre services - when a room in an apartment is offered, sometimes “free”, in exchange for services.

Sometimes the service is perfectly innocent - cleaning the apartment or washing clothes, to defray some of the high cost of renting property.

But sometimes it is not: instead the requests are sexual, demeaning, bordering on the perverse. “Sex twice a month,” is one blunt demand. Another asks for someone “open in spirit and elsewhere”.

France has many problems like high unemployment, labour unions, old age pensions (40 and older people have no employment scopes), rising fundamentalism, immigrants, trade deficit within EU countries etc. This is a critical time for France to come out of the woods. President Nicholas Sarkozy and Prime Minister François Fillon gave that hope.

Within a few days in office, Sarkozy started sending out vibes that started upsetting Frenchmen like me. First, he said that he would cooperate more closely with the big bully USA. Then he started showing his temper in public. A public figure like him has to understand that the people who elected him to office have some rights to know about some personal matters. One TV reporter asked him about his divorce and he just walked out of the interview and called his press secretary ‘imbecile’. This, I thought, was unbecoming of a president of a great nation.

France is not like other governments in Europe; say for example – Britain. Tony Blair himself came to court for hearing during the David Kelly suicide following the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq scandal. In France, such a thing is unthinkable. There is too much bureaucracy, too much distance between government heads and general public. French people thought that this perception might change with fresh heads of governments. But it did not happen. Whenever public tried to get close to Sarkozy, he just shunned them.

That is not the problem to think about deeply. The problem is that Sarkozy is doing little or nothing and too busy with his personal life. He first divorces, within days find a new highflying Italian model girlfriend and goes for an Egyptian holiday with his new lover. Then gets married within weeks of divorce, sues companies for copyrights violation etc. he does not seem to have any time for France’s affairs. It looks that cooperation between him and the prime minister is non-existent. His foreign policy is also ambiguous. He seems to make more statements and comments than doing real work.

All old problems remain and there is no effort to solve them. I do not know where he is leading France to. It seems like old wine in new bottle that tastes even bitter. Hope he understands the French public’s disappointments and pull his socks up.