Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s so-called “omnipresent” president, this week attended the G8 summit in Japan, addressed the European parliament in Strasbourg, and held a series of high-profile diplomatic meetings in Paris ahead of Sunday's’s grand launch of the Union for the Mediterranean.

Yet it was his willowy wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, who bagged the prime-time interview on France’s main television channel on Friday night after launching her latest album of songs.