Kushner's lawyers skirted an anti-nepotism law, after it came out he's doing business with a foreign firm.

Ignoring federal nepotism rules, Jared Kushner — Donald Trump’s son-in-law — has been named a senior adviser to the president in the upcoming administration. Kushner had reportedly met with lawyers to devise a plan to circumvent a law that prohibits public officials from hiring family members, including son-in-laws, to an office over which that official has authority.

Shortly after the election, President-elect Trump hinted that Kushner was being groomed for an important role, saying that his son-in-law was so talented that he could help “do peace in the Middle East.” The president-elect reportedly requested that Kushner receive top secret clearance to join him for his daily briefings.

Kushner hired the law firm WilmerHale for counsel on how to comply with ethics legislation if he were to be appointed to a White House position.

The chief executive of a real estate empire that owns property around the globe, Kushner undoubtedly needs to brush up on ethical governing. Kushner has conferred with foreign leaders during the transition, reportedly representing his Kushner Companies. Kushner had dinner with Wu Xiaohui, the chairman of a powerful Chinese company, Anbang — which has close ties to the government of the People’s Republic of China — to discuss the redevelopment of 666 Fifth Avenue, one of the Kushner Companies’ flagship properties. The New York Times reported that these discussions started around the time that Trump won the Republican nomination.

|  A  SALON release  |  January 10, 2017  |

In the latest in our Five Questions For.....series we interrogate the West’s most seasoned operational intelligence officer on Russia......

Major General Peter Williams (pictured) is often considered the most experienced military specialist on Russia and its intentions. He was a member of the allied Cross Mission to the old USSR and this saw him for many years operationally involved in intelligence gathering within the Iron Curtain. At the conclusion of the Cold War he led the NATO mission to the new Russian Federation. Five questions now follow for General Williams:-

What will be the nature of the US-Russia rapprochement under Donald Trump?We are going to have to wait and see just how much free rein Trump finds himself to have. Clearly his personal outlook on the world, including on Russia, is coloured by his own lengthy career as a businessman. He is not a career politician or a Washington insider, but he and his new yet-to-be-confirmed by Congress Secretary of State will find themselves the recipients of advice from the departments of the US government, members of Congress and the US media, much of which will run counter to Trump's instincts and initial aspirations. It will all be about Trump getting better informed about the details of the many challenges to US interests posed by Russia and then coming up with a new, personal synthesis of the existing situation.In a nutshell, it's too early to say how Trump as President will react to the challenges and opportunities presented by the Kremlin, but he will stamp his own character on whatever redefined approach --possibly rapprochement, but not necessarily so-- emerges as 2017 progresses. And then there is the reality of 'events, events, events' - the unforeseeable developments that British prime minister Harold Macmillan once identified as the biggest challenge that would face any politician.

Will the trade embargo quickly dissolve?Almost certainly not. Congress seems much less likely to be in a forgiving and conciliatory mood where Russia is concerned than Trump may currently appear to be. Dismantling trade embargoes is not a simple procedure, not least where they are coordinated on a multinational basis.

Your opinion of the Russian espionage/hacking operations within the US?We will never get a clear explanation about what may have been the precise scale and details of the alleged Russian espionage/hacking operations in the US, but there is no reason, given the track record over many decades of Soviet and Russian disinformation and disruption operations, not to believe that the Kremlin has been seeking to take advantage of the perceived weaknesses of the Obama presidency, particularly during its dying months.

Others such as China, North Korea, and certain other allies will have been doing the same at the same time. The US, along with the West in general including far-off New Zealand, is a pretty soft target for disinformation and disruption operations. Whether any Russian hacking actually managed to affect the outcome of the US Presidential and Congressional election process we'll almost certainly never know for sure.

Where and why did Western-Russian relations go wrong during the Obama years?It is perhaps more accurate to describe what failed to happen, rather than what actually went wrong. Obama and Hillary Clinton sought to re-set the US-Russia relationship, but in truth the rupture went back to 2007 when Putin re-evaluated the relationship and decided that it had not been in Russia's national interests to allow the West to get too close to Russia.By 2007 NATO enlargement had brought the Alliance right up to the borders of the Russian Federation and now the threat of Ukrainian and Georgian membership of NATO was identified as a step too far into the cordon sanitaire that the Kremlin felt must separate the West physically from Russia. The EU had also been expanding to the east in a similar manner, taking into its fold nations that Russia had long viewed as Russian client states.

The 2008 Georgian war put paid to NATO's expansion - even if Russia's military campaign had been tactically and operationally less than flawless, the strategic result was clear: Russia had stopped NATO enlargement in its tracks. The final straw was the EU's active encouragement of the Euromaidan overthrow of the democratically elected albeit utterly corrupt Ukrainian president. The seizure and annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin-supported insurrection in Eastern Ukraine put paid to any chance of rapprochement between Russia and the West in all its forms, not least NATO and the EU.

Taking a world view, where do you see Western-Russian relations in five years?Whatever the situation will be in 2022, it is sure to be different from the situation today where Western-Russian relations are concerned. It is much too early to be able to predict whether Trump will actually launch a process that might deliver a substantive rapprochement with Russia. If he does so, such a rapprochement will not be without its risks, one of which must be a danger of fracturing the current common hard line that the West has been holding against Russia.

In the last year or so, sensing a vacuum in Western leadership, Russian strategy in Syria has wrong-footed the West. Russian military power has enjoyed a significant victory, which will both strengthen the position of the hawks in the Kremlin and will give a boost to Russia's state-controlled armaments sector, which can expect increased export sales as a result of the technology demonstration that the Syrian intervention has provided.

Finally, although I am by nature one of life's cautious optimists and I believe that rapprochement with Russia could be portrayed as a sensible act of realpolitik, it is hard to see just how Trump can deliver the re-set of the US-Russia relationship without which any wider Western-Russian rapprochement seems doomed to fail. If The Donald can pull off this deal, he will have confounded his sceptical enemies and will have earned the adulation of his new-found supporters.

|  From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk  | Friday 6 January 2017  |

Le Parisien Determined to Identify What Voters Believe in place of what elites believe they believe.

Paris’ leading daily newspaper, the tabloid Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France has outlawed from its pages all poll-based predictions on the pending presidential election.

The centrist popular daily blames unquestioning reliance on polls, known in France as “soundings” to have led to the embarrassing set of circumstances in which Alain Juppe was unanimously predicted to become the successful candidate of the right-of-centre Republican Party.

In the event, and as MSC Newswire’s European correspondent had predicted, (see our story below) the successful candidate was Francois Fillon who now becomes the favourite to win the pending presidential (i.e. general) election.

In the same forecast, MSC Newswire had also predicted that current president Francois Hollande would not be the Socialist Party candidate in the election. In the event, and several days after our prediction, Mr Hollande stood down.

Meanwhile, according to Le Parisien, the elimination of polls, soundings, and other tendentious content will be replaced by plain and simple reporting.

The objective being to report what people are in fact thinking in place of the former practice of reporting on what a narrow elite believe, or want to believe, everyday people are thinking.

According to our European correspondent, Alain Juppe’s “Happy Identity” slogan was only finding approval among the media.

Similarly Mr Juppe’s involvement with a funds scandal, which had caused him to live in Canada, was taken seriously by voters, if not the media.

Also, the idea of a Clintonesque co-presidency (see front page), while attractive to the media, nonetheless dismayed the public at large, as it did voters in the United States presidential election.

|  From the MSCNewswire reporters' desk  |  Thursday January 5 2017  |

The End of the Politically Correct

Our foreign correspondent forecast the Trump victory, and now previews the fall of France’s Francois Hollande ....

| Napier, MSCNewsWire, Nov 24, 2016 | - The predicted fall of France’s president Francois Hollande in next year’s election will bring to a close the initial era of political correctness. He is scheduled to become the third big-economy leader victim within less than a year of the accelerating electoral power of the non-political class.

Mr Hollande is known as the King of Consensus. His determination prior to any decision to canvass every opinion and nuance in his own Socialist Party and also in the string of other French leftward parties conveyed an impression of dithering in the face of islamic insurgency.

Instead of being seen to be heading a tough reaction Mr Hollande’s nature lead him to be more at home leading candle lit marches, vigils and uttering trite panaceas in the face of the emergency. It was left to his prime minister Manuel Valls to express the public mood about the threat throughout France of rampant religious extremism.

Worse still, Mr Hollande was viewed as being over-preoccupied by the star studded Paris climate conference with its breathtaking ritual insights into the blindingly obvious instead of with the much more visible and immediate terrorist threat

The most visible manifestation of Mr Hollande’s pending loss of the presidency is the number of his own hand-picked cabinet members who are deserting the sinking ship. The “frondeurs” as the rebels are known are setting themselves up, they are still in their 30s and 40s, for the 2022 election.

There is though in the anticipated disappearance of Mr Hollande a signal point of difference with those other landmark scupperings of the political classes, Brexit and Trump. The difference is that this time everyone is expecting it.

The winner of the French Republican Party primaries is now looked to as the winner of the presidency. This is looking, in fact, increasingly like former premier Francois Fillon.Mr Hollande’s political career has been an inch-by-inch bureaucratic progression characterised by a reverse Clinton-effect process.

His life-mate Segolene Royale (pictured above with Hollande) with whom he has four children was the glamorous one. Her attempt to crack the French version of the glass ceiling was more spectacular than anything attempted by Hillary.

In the event she lost to Sarkozy.

It was now that that the blander Francois entered the lists and in doing so streamlined his approach by parting from Segolene.  The go-it-alone Francois now beat the unpopular Nicolas Sarkozy and the ElyseesPalace was his and his Socialist Party’s.

Four and a half years later he looks like a president who knows he can’t win. He is unlikely to hand over to the rather more decisive figure of his prime minister Manuel Valls.

No major economy leader, not even President Obama, personifies so closely as does Francois Hollande the twin pillars of diversity and multiculturalism which in France’s case are supercharged by the Revolutionary code of the Rights of Man.

Few doubt his sincerity of purpose. It is just that as with the other casualties of this new wave politics, the Clintons, he found himself reading from an out-of-date script.

Reformation in US, UK, and France Suddenly Transforms United Nations Hegemony

 The old established order, the one founded in traditionally-accepted geopolitical foreign policies began to dissolve at the same time as New Zealand took its seat as a temporary member for the first time of the United Nations Security Council.

The old order was based on policies that would continue and in the United States especially would do so on a dynastic basis. In the other two western alliance members of the permanent Security Council, United Kingdom and France this too was the order of the day.

For New Zealand its willingness to follow the great power party line now that it was a guest at High Table seemed a natural thing to do.

In this special holiday-read article we now examine events of 30 years ago that in so many ways echo delayed action events in the Security Council now and especially so in regard to the way in which New Zealand’s willingness to follow Senior School policies can leave it hanging out to dry.......................

The peak of New Zealand’s world stage role in more recent times and in a sensational sense occurred in 1985 in two incidents in two vastly separated locations.

The first of these dual episodes was Prime Minister David Lange’s appearance in March 1 at the Oxford Union debate on nuclear weapons.

The second came a few months later in Auckland with the blowing up of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior. This then became compounded with the capture of the two French agents responsible for the harbour sabotage.

The very public and compounding challenge to France, a permanent member of the Security Council, one of the five great powers that won World War 2, engendered a crusading atmosphere among the New Zealand political class.

This compounded with the national craving centred on punching above “our” weight engendered such a shared feeling of empowerment that David Lange’s Labour government carried through its sweeping globalist policies that now placed New Zealand in the very front rank of economic deregulation.

Now though and at the height of international acclaim trouble manifested itself in Oceania in the form of Lieutenant General Vernon Walters (pictured with President Nixon) in Fiji on “holiday.”

General Walters at this time, 1987, was United States ambassador to United Nations.

Prior to that he had served as deputy director of the CIA.

Two military coups in succession soon followed this soldierly vacation dalliance with the result that Fiji became a republic.

That same year 1987 General Walters was inducted into the US Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.

Sabre rattling followed with the result that military intervention from New Zealand now seemed possible if not likely.

In the event, the intervention came via Australia which now instructed New Zealand not to intervene.

Another problem was that the burden of this message was delivered on a personal basis with Australian foreign office officials making high profile visits to New Zealand.

At this time the Cold War was still in progress.

This reliance on face-to-face exchanges indicated too the state of New Zealand’s military grade longer haul communications.

These were deemed to be unreliable through the activities of deep penetration agents known to have been active in the 1960s if not the 1970s, and therefore likely to have left legacies well into the 1980s.

After the world stage nuclear moral triumphs the Australian intervention over Fiji was a comedown.

Many believe now that New Zealand amplified this by its continuing coolness if not hostility and indeed, utter inability to accept the new republican regime in Fiji .

This regime in the event soon found firm friends in the form of Russia and China. These countries are the other two permanent members of the United Nations Security Council

It was now though that there was born the concept of New Zealand taking a seat on the United Nations Security Council, as one of the numerous temporary members.

As the years slipped by this became a determined goal and eventually a realisable one.

Australia had been a temporary-tier member of the Security Council on numerous occasions.

Luck now played its part as New Zealand’s debut began to take solid form. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the resulting trade sanctions of which New Zealand was and remains very much part of occurred too late in the piece to interfere in the membership process.

The China – New Zealand Free Trade Agreement was a roaring success, so no veto from there.

Britain was a natural supporter.

The United States was appreciative of New Zealand’s help with its Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement.

France the other permanent Security Council member had long since buried the hatchet with New Zealand and indeed had taken over Britain’s imperial investment role in things like utilities, construction materials, electronics, financial services, urban transport and via Pernod Ricard, wine.

The permanent members, the great powers, were thus in 2014 in alignment and so New Zealand’s second tier membership went ahead..

Now and given the lead time between membership approval and admission there has taken place amid the three western power permanent members a paradigm shift akin to a reformation, and which can substantially be traced to the breakup of the state system in the Middle East.

The first indication of this shift was Britain’s announced departure from the EU and the ensuing resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron.

The second was the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

The third western permanent member of the Security Council to undergo this shift became France.

This was predicted by MSC Newswire (The End of the Politically Correct—November 24 2016)

President Francois Hollande now announced that he would not be offering himself for re-election in 2017.

As they start packing their bags for the return home the New Zealand delegation to the second tier, the impermanent one, of United Nations, and with the standing ovation accorded to their sponsored resolution, the one on Israel, still ringing in their ears, one or two veterans may cast their minds back, well, 30 years.

They will remember that time in Fiji when the United States seemed to be so present, yet so removed when the Fiji coups took place.

They will remember too just how stern and unfriendly the Australians suddenly became.

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Wednesday 4 January 2017

More reading:  The End of the Politically Correct—November 24 2016

On Nov 21, United States President-elect Donald Trump said in a short video message that he would move to withdraw "on day one" from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the US-led 12-member deal that excludes China and covers 40 per cent of world GDP and one-third of world trade.

He considers TPP a potential disaster and said: "Instead, we will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores."

Trump's position confirms his central campaign pledge of focusing on "America First", which may imply that the US-established world order is close to its end after 70 years.

Hong Kong should seize the day if Trump opts out of TPP.

However, China is in a different position.

China became a member of the World Trade Organisation in 2001 and since then has deeply integrated itself into the world economy.

In 15 years, China's total GDP grew nearly tenfold and jumped from the world's sixth rank to No 2.

The stalled TPP puts China in the free-trade pole position and opens opportunities for writing new rules for international trade.

Earlier, speaking at the APEC CEO Summit in Lima, Peru, President Xi Jinping called on countries to speed up the negotiation of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) as the basis for building the broader Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) to pave the way for a more inclusive global economy.

RCEP excludes the US but includes 10 Asean countries plus Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea; it covers 32 per cent of world GDP and 30 per cent of world trade.

FTAAP includes the US and China and 19 other world economies; it covers 55 per cent of world GDP and 44 per cent of world trade.

How will all this affect Hong Kong?

We enjoy a strategic geographical advantage, a well-developed infrastructure and a superb international communication network. Plus we play an important role as entrepot for trade between the Chinese mainland and the world. In 2015 Hong Kong was the world's eighth-largest trading economy in goods and the seventh-largest exporter and importer.

Due to our close trade links with the mainland, any mainland trade growth or decline would inevitably affect Hong Kong. For example, in 2015 we were the second-largest trading partner of the mainland (after the US), with a trade value accounting for 8.7 per cent of its total trade; also we were the mainland's second-largest export market, taking up 14.6 per cent or US$331.6 billion (S$478.5 billion) of its total exports.

In the same year, the value of goods re-exported through Hong Kong from and to the mainland was US$410.3 billion, comprising 89.4 per cent of our total re-export trade value.

Such a strong mainland-Hong Kong trade relationship would ensure that if the mainland could benefit from the demise of TPP, such benefits would also accrue to Hong Kong.

The US-based Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that TPP would increase trade activity between its member countries, while China's annual export loss would be about US$100 billion.

But this gloomy scenario presumably will no longer happen.

The likelihood is that if TPP fails and RCEP comes into effect, China would benefit by US$88 billion, according to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission's latest annual report, and Hong Kong would benefit accordingly.

So, can Hong Kong afford to stay complacent?

The answer is: "No."

We know that while the US economic loss presents opportunities for China as a whole, Hong Kong must also beware the economic difficulties that may result from a more protectionist environment.

Therefore, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) should ride the post-TPP tide and aggressively expand its bilateral and multilateral trade agreements.

First, Hong Kong must complete its negotiations with the Asean countries for a free-trade agreement.

Asean is economically the fastest growing group globally, and is our fourth-largest export market and second-largest trading partner.

The Hong Kong-Asean Free Trade Agreement, coupled with the mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA), would provide a solid platform to facilitate trade and investment among Hong Kong and Asean countries and enhance our role as a regional trading hub.

This would also facilitate Hong Kong's partnering with Asean countries and companies participating in the Belt and Road (B&R) Initiative which encompasses about 60 countries and covers 40 per cent of world GDP and over 60 per cent of world population.

Hong Kong's next major task is to work closely with the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a financial vehicle closely connected with the B&R Initiative.

After the AIIB was established at the end of 2015, 57 countries had signed its inter-governmental agreements.

As China's first multilateral financial institution, AIIB will provide new opportunities for countries both inside and outside Asia.

James Woolsey, a Trump senior adviser on national security, defence and intelligence, has said that the Obama administration's opposition to AIIB is a "strategic error".

He hoped Trump would be more enthusiastic about China's B&R Initiative. Perhaps we can hope that when Trump takes office in January 2017, there may be a US policy change favouring more US-China cooperation.

The author is an independent scholar and freelance writer. She is also the founder and president of the China-US Friendship Exchange Inc.

President-elect Donald Trump's threat to slap punitive tariffs on Chinese goods is a worry for firms that trade with the country in the US Midwest, a decisive region in the Republican's election triumph.

Strong support across America's "Rust Belt," and frustration at lost industrial jobs blamed on globalization, carried Trump to victory last month in key battleground states, including Michigan and Ohio.

But some companies in the region that benefit from global trade are worried about early signs the president-elect plans to take a hardline stance with China.

"We export a lot of products to China," said David Shogren, president of US International Foods. "My fear is whatever changes Trump makes ... that China will retaliate in some ways."

The St. Louis company depends on China as a key export market for peanut butter, mustard, nuts, cereals and other items. About 50 percent of its revenues are tied to China, compared with just five percent to its home market.

"Our customers may switch from US products to other countries: Europe, Australia, New Zealand or Japan, or other exporting countries," Shogren said.

Shogren said his company is trying to build markets in Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore.

Trump during the campaign threatened to impose 45 percent tariffs on China, saying the world's second biggest economy has stiffed the US with currency manipulation and illegal subsidies.

"China will take a tit-for-tat approach," said an editorial in Global Times, a Chinese newspaper that is close to the government.

"A batch of Boeing orders will be replaced by Airbus. US auto and iPhone sales in China will suffer a setback, and US soybean and maize imports will be halted," it warned. "China can also limit the number of Chinese students studying in the US."

China also responded sharply to Trump's decision to accept a phone call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen and to suggestions he is rethinking the decades-old US "One China policy."

The One China policy is the "political bedrock" of relations with the US, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said.

If it is "compromised or disrupted" cooperation in major fields would be "out of the question," Geng added.

- Writing to Trump -Ohio-based Progressive Molding Technologies imports tooling from China that enables it to compete with Chinese rivals.

"My fear is we will lose access to China's cheap tools," said president Laird Daubenspeck. "At that point, I will anticipate the our customers will start to slow down new product launches and we will see less growth."

Daubenspeck has written twice to Trump, once after he was elected and a second time after the Taiwan phone call.

"My biggest fear is he doesn't understand the impact his words have."

Among big manufacturers, Boeing is especially vulnerable. About one out of three Boeing 737 planes delivered in 2015 was destined for China. The company just announced Monday that it will reduce production of its 777 starting in August, which will have an impact on employment.

General Motors also could see its business disrupted in a trade war. China is GM's biggest market for cars, with 2.38 million vehicles sold in the first eight months of 2016, compared with 1.96 million in the US. GM also manufactures the Buick Envision in China, which is exported to the US and could suffer under US tariffs.

A GM spokesman said it was too early to comment on any potential shifts in trade policy, but noted that GM chief executive Mary Barra agreed to participate in Trump's strategic and policy forum, along with other top chief executives.

The century-old National Foreign Trade Council on Monday said it will work with the new administration but will fight protectionism.

"And we're prepared to argue against the use of trade restrictions as a way of achieving greater economic growth -- history has shown that really isn't an effective way of doing that," Rufus Yerxa, head of the 300-company NFTC, whose members export about $3 trillion a year.

Third Domino tumbles in wipe-out of political class

The decision by France’s president Francois Hollande not to offer himself for re-election for another five year term brings to an end the heyday of client-politics in the western alliance.

Known in France simply as “clientelism” the process is borrowed from industrial consumer merchandising.

It amounts to identifying numerous sector or niche markets. Then tailoring a special approach to each in order to create the desired mass market, in this case of votes

Mr Hollande, known in France as the King of Concensus, brought this whole technique to a fine art.

Anything at all would be tossed back and forth, tested, then tossed back and forth again for further consultation.

It was Mr Hollande’s bad luck that he was in the driving seat when France went through its most tumultuous period in the past half century in the form of islamic insurgency.

It was now that Mr Hollande fell back on his consensus technique which took the form of testing the reaction of his sprawling left constituency to sweeping aside France’s exaggerated code of rights in order to implement the state of the emergency that the situation required.

As was his custom, Mr Hollande sought out acceptable displacement activities such as leading parades to commemorate the slain in these atrocities.

He immersed himself in the Paris climate conference. At any other time France’s ultra-politicised politico-professional liberals would have trumpeted his presence at the high altar of the political class as an example of his mastery of statesmanship.

Instead his absorption by the liberal ritual was construed as still another example of Mr Hollande’s reluctance to bite any bullet for fear of losing votes.

Mr Hollande is a photo-fit of the political class. He started at one of France’s political versions of West Point. In his case ENA, and then zig-zagged his way forward, his pace accelerating during his patronage under the aegis of the regal Francois Mitterand.

Cruelly, and in the Latin tradition, everyone, and from all his niche markets, now has their boot into the hapless outgoing president.

The most vicious kicks in the guts are from his own former proteges whose careers he had so assiduously nurtured in the tradition of the French political class.

Celui qui essaie d'avoir des amis avec tout le monde n'a pas d'amis.

He who tries to be friends with everyone has no friends

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Friday 2 December 206

Earlier MSC article: The end of the Politically Correct

Our foreign correspondent forecast the Trump victory, and now previews the fall of France’s Francois Hollande ....

| Napier, MSCNewsWire, Nov 24, 2016 | - The predicted fall of France’s president Francois Hollande in next year’s election will bring to a close the initial era of political correctness. He is scheduled to become the third big-economy leader victim within less than a year of the accelerating electoral power of the non-political class.

Mr Hollande is known as the King of Consensus. His determination prior to any decision to canvass every opinion and nuance in his own Socialist Party and also in the string of other French leftward parties conveyed an impression of dithering in the face of islamic insurgency.

Instead of being seen to be heading a tough reaction Mr Hollande’s nature lead him to be more at home leading candle lit marches, vigils and uttering trite panaceas in the face of the emergency. It was left to his prime minister Manuel Valls to express the public mood about the threat throughout France of rampant religious extremism.

Worse still, Mr Hollande was viewed as being over-preoccupied by the star studded Paris climate conference with its breathtaking ritual insights into the blindingly obvious instead of with the much more visible and immediate terrorist threat

The most visible manifestation of Mr Hollande’s pending loss of the presidency is the number of his own hand-picked cabinet members who are deserting the sinking ship. The “frondeurs” as the rebels are known are setting themselves up, they are still in their 30s and 40s, for the 2022 election.

There is though in the anticipated disappearance of Mr Hollande a signal point of difference with those other landmark scupperings of the political classes, Brexit and Trump. The difference is that this time everyone is expecting it.

The winner of the French Republican Party primaries is now looked to as the winner of the presidency. This is looking, in fact, increasingly like former premier Francois Fillon.Mr Hollande’s political career has been an inch-by-inch bureaucratic progression characterised by a reverse Clinton-effect process.

His life-mate Segolene Royale (pictured above with Hollande) with whom he has four children was the glamorous one. Her attempt to crack the French version of the glass ceiling was more spectacular than anything attempted by Hillary.

In the event she lost to Sarkozy.

It was now that that the blander Francois entered the lists and in doing so streamlined his approach by parting from Segolene.  The go-it-alone Francois now beat the unpopular Nicolas Sarkozy and the ElyseesPalace was his and his Socialist Party’s.

Four and a half years later he looks like a president who knows he can’t win. He is unlikely to hand over to the rather more decisive figure of his prime minister Manuel Valls.

No major economy leader, not even President Obama, personifies so closely as does Francois Hollande the twin pillars of diversity and multiculturalism which in France’s case are supercharged by the Revolutionary code of the Rights of Man.

Few doubt his sincerity of purpose. It is just that as with the other casualties of this new wave politics, the Clintons, he found himself reading from an out-of-date script