Rachida Dati seen by a billion on TV with President

Show me a girl with patent red leather high heels and I will show you a racing certainty", Chris Bernard once said, so the sight of Rachida Dati , Minister of Justice and Nicolas Sarkozy's mistress du jour in her trademark high heels and scarlet scarf at the Stades du France on Saturday confirmed that she is still as addicted to her favourite colour as ever.

Although when her "rise horizontale" started under the wing of Arnaud Lagardere whose media empire (Lagardere Active Media LAM ) includes Paris Match - and Elle, Europe 1 TV, and the Journal du Dimanche hleped finance his frequent visits to the French Turf she did for a while (as Lord Patel can attest) unclothe herself in the pink and grey racing colours of the Lagardere stable from a becoming little lingeriste just of the Rue de Fauborg St.Honore.

Therefore vision mixers at ITV must have been delighted when they could squeeze in the ravishing features of the 41 year old beautiful divorcee (and once the top selling Avon rep in Burgundy) when showing the beaming South African President , Thabo Mbeki in the Diplomatic boxes at the World Cup Final on Saturday.

It was of course Arnaud's Paris Match which was exposed (Lord Patel post here) as having removed the pint sized President's "love handles" or poignees d'amour which L'Express exposed as a heavily photoshopped images from the Dati / Sarkozy holiday at a at a luxury resort in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire this summer.

Rachida (known to the President as "Roc" ,a diminutive lovers name contracted from la Marocaine) tells me that he is peculiarly sensitive to his poignees d'amour and gets pissed off when she teases him about them. They are she says essential for when "le Jockey" (as he is known to her) becomes passionate he is as they say at Longchamps, liable to "dismount" - Toni Fabuloso has an alternative and rather coarse expression from the world of horse racers which discloses more knowledge of equine anatomy and physiology than she should have or we are willing to disclose.

Rachida also disclosed recently to us that her predescessor in the Ministry of Justice had been a great help in her career. Albin Chalandon was France's justice minister under Jacques Chirac when Dati approached him (he was then 66) at an Algerian embassy party in 1986 and asked for help. He ws ablwe to oblige and got her a job as an accountant at the oil giant ELF-Acquitaine where he had been in charge from 1977 to 1983... and he was there at the ceremony when she was sworn into office earlier this year.

Meanwhile the ex Mrs Sarkozy, Cecilia ,will soon be publishing a book , "Why I divorced the President", she tells us.