Following ia a broadcast on Ireland's RTE radio, which I thought deserved a second outing:

In the Asterix book Obelix and Company, there is a character called Gaius Saugrenus. He is a brilliant young Roman technocrat who has the inspired idea that the best way of beating the last Gaulish redoubt is to corrupt it with money. He starts buying up quantities of Obelix's stone menhirs, Obelix is transformed into a ruthless capitalist -- and for a time the sky really does look as if it's falling on their heads.

Gaius Saugrenus eventually gets his come-uppance of course, and he ends the book in disgrace. Which is a fate not shared by the man on whom the character is modelled. Because look hard at those enthusiastic, chiselled features -- strip off the toga and put on a suit -- and who do you see? It is, of course, the young Jacques Chirac -- back in the mid 70s the epitome of youthful technocractic energy, and already ... French prime minister.

This introduction is by way of a reminder not just of the sheer length of Jacques Chirac's monumental career, but also of how at the start he was seen as a vigorous can-do kind of man, brimful of ideas on how to modernise society and the economy. Fresh out of the elite national administration school ENA, he had his first job as an adviser to prime minister Georges Pompidou in 1962.! He was a minister in 1967 and prime minister in May 1974, when Sugar Baby Love by The Rubettes was number one in the charts and Liam Cosgrave was Taoiseach.

After that it was mayor of Paris for 18 years, prime minister again in the 1980s and then -- capping it all -- the 12 years as president that will come to an end in May.

What did Jacques Chirac have that made him last so long? The answer is two things: likeability and luck. No-one dislikes Jacques Chirac. When the dour leftwinger Lionel Jospin was Chirac's prime minister, he was infuriated that several socialist cabinet members starting visibly warming to the president, simply because he was so affable. A poll shows that Chirac is the poltician most of the public would like to have dinner with.

He has a big appetite, he likes patting cows' bottoms, he is unintellectual, he talks in flowery vapidities -- French people love that kind of stuff. And he's lucky: never more so than in 2002 when -- an unpopular sitting president -- he was re-elected with a record 80 percent of the vote because his opponent in the run-off was Jean-Marie Le Pen.

What Jacques Chirac did not have -- contrary to the early dynamic image -- was any considered idea of what to do with the power he was so good at acquiring. The man they once dubbed Chamelon Bonaparte flipflopped like a bream on a griddle. Once he loathed Europe -- now he's a breathless cheerleader; once he was a Thatcherite, then he discovered the "social fracture"; once he exploded atomic bombs in the Pacific, then he became a Green. With each shift he went on telly and spoke with such utter conviction -- mes chers compatriotes, he'd begin -- that somehow he got away with it.

But many would say -- and I agree -- that his have been wasted years -- a mere continuation of the Mitterrand period, with debt and unemployment and low growth now compounded by the grumbling tremors in the banlieues.

When the Asterix book ends Gaius Saugrenus has hooked the whole of Roman society on Obelix's menhirs, offering subsidies which he can't remove, as Rome plunges into economic crisis, because of the fear of public protests. As chance would have it, Chirac leaves a country that is also labouring under a growing debt burden -- and if there's been no reform here it is also not least because of a congenital fear of "the street". But of course, for all Goscinny and Uderzo's uncanny foresight, the parallel ends there. Because if Gaus Saugrenus got his come-uppance -- fed to the lions by Julius Caesar -- somehow Jacques Chirac never got his.

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