Rachida’s godfather ploy was last straw for Carla

Ever since President Nicolas Sarkozy fired his glamorous Justice Minister, Rachida Dati, earlier this year, there have rumours that Carla Bruni had a hand in it. When she sashayed into Sarkozy's life, France's First Lady was immediately cold towards Dati: in a now infamous story, Bruni is said to have pointed to Sarkozy's bed at the Elysee Palace and said to Dati: "You'd have loved to occupy it, wouldn't you?"

Now a French journalist has produced a book in which she claims that it was indeed Bruni who persuaded her husband to give Dati the heave-ho after the minister took her newborn baby - father's identity still unknown - into the president's office and asked him to be godfather.

"Without making an appointment - she didn't want to risk being refused - she burst into the Elysee, the baby in her arms," Jacqueline Remy writes in Du Rimmel et des Larmes (literal translation: Tears and Mascara). "Sarkozy could hardly refuse. It was a nice little coup."

Except that when Bruni got wind of the ambush, she decided it was the last straw. She was already exasperated by Dati's habit of phoning her husband early each morning. As for Sarkozy, he was by all accounts fed up with watching the Justice Ministry lurch from crisis to crisis, and needed little encouragement to let her go.

Tears and Mascara deals with Dati's ruthless ambition, especially when it comes to using men to get the top. According to Remy, Dati once told a girlfriend: "You go out with completely uninteresting boys. You should screw usefully." ·