Youth in power is a 'weakness' Nicolas Sarkozy warns Emmanuel Macron in new book

Youth is a “weakness” when wielding power, Nicolas Sarkozy warns Emmanuel Macron in a new book in which he lavishes praise on the French president's "quality" wife Brigitte while noting the "abyss" between French and British politics.

The release of Passions, a 360-page autobiography which charts the conservative's rise to power in 2007, comes days after judges confirmed that Mr Sarkozy will become the first ex-French president to be tried for corruption and abuse of power.

While many ex-rivals and allies come in for shrill criticism, the centrist Mr Macron, whose 2017 victory effectively destroyed the mainstream Right Mr Sarkozy once led, is described as a “dear friend” and there appears to be a gentlemen’s agreement not to criticise his policies.

Mr Sarkozy says he was touched that Mr Macron sent two police motorbikes to accompany the hearse of his deceased mother.

But he does warn: “At the end of the day, if youth is a great advantage to win power, it is a weakness when you have to wield it.

“(Former) President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, president Emmanuel Macron and myself have been confronted with this contradiction. I hope the current president resolves it better than his predecessors, myself included.”

In an interview with Le Point on Thursday, Mr Sarkozy also remarks: “He’s an enigma. I don’t know who he is. I’m seeking authenticity. He’s seeking to be loved.”

In the book, Mr Sarkozy confirms that Brigitte Macron - widely reported to have Right-wing tendencies - was a fan, saying that when the Macrons invited him and his wife Carla to the Elysée, the French First Lady told him: “I’ve always had a liking for you and I don't regret it.”

“I was touched by the sincerity and simplicity of Brigitte Macron. She is a woman of quality. I appreciate her commitment to her husband and the conscientiousness with which she fulfills her role,” he writes.

However, female politicians generally get short shrift, with Mr Sarkozy saying: “I have on occasion been disappointed by the behaviour of some. I have even seen more betrayals and cruelty from female politicians than men”.

Asked why by Le Point, he says they doubtless had to “fight tough battles and are hardened or because they think they must give an image of firmness and in the end are tougher”.

In the same breath, he adds: “I had the luck to meet Margaret Thatcher when very young. I had asked to see her after her resignation. She received me at her home and told me: 'Politics is about fighting minute by minute.' I like strong women and with Carla I'm not disappointed.”

The only other British politician who gets a mention is former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose definition as a "Socialist" Mr Sarkozy says sums up the yawning gap between French and UK politics.

Recalling meeting Mr Brown as Chancellor, he said the two got on well together, "although he was very difficult to understand, as much because of his extremely thick Scottish accent as by the intense complexity of the simplest of his reasoning".

The pair were very close after Mr Brown became Prime Minister.

He adds: "I could measure the abyss separating British political life from ours. Gordon Brown belongs to the Labour party while on a number of subjects I found myself clearly on his Left.

"He is a convinced liberal, a staunch partisan of regulation only by the market and a constant adversary of state intervention. I found it amusing to note that just as I was being accused in France of veering hard-Right, I could work hand in hand with a Socialist of the 21st century."

Mr Sarkozy's was far less warm regarding many of his Gallic rivals and ex-colleagues.

François Hollande, his Socialist successor at the Elysée who recently brought out his own best-selling memoirs, is slammed for his “brutality”. Ségolène Royal, whom Mr Sarkozy beat to become president in 2007, is "capable of affirming anything without believing a word of it".

His erstwhile boss, former president Jacques Chirac comes off as a charismatic but ultimately vapid figure. “I understood finally why (he) was the boss. Stoical under pressure. Full of sang froid. At root, so indifferent to everyone.”

Dominique de Villepin, his former party rival and Mr Chirac’s prime minister, was, meanwhile he writes, "perched in a virtual world”.

But he reserves his harshest criticism for Francois Fillon, Mr Sarkozy’s former prime minister who beat him in 2016 party primaries only to crash out on charges he had his British wife paid taxpayers’ money for a fake job.

“François Fillon, in the manner of the Tudors, was punished by his own sin. Even so, his attitude came as a surprise and a disappointment,” he writes, referring to Mr Fillon’s reported attempt to speed up investigations against his former boss in a bid to knock him out of primaries.

"I found him serious, competent, solid and thought he was capable of loyalty. I thought I knew him…What followed showed I was wrong…rarely have I misjudged a character this much.”

The brash ex-president recounts his traumatic split from his ex-wife Cecilia Attias, which she informed him of as he was driving towards a crucial final TV debate with his Socialist rival in 2007.

“It’s an understatement to say that at the time Cecilia’s attitude astonished me. I had anticipated nothing. I had understood nothing. I endured without being able to control the situation, which, every day, became more incomprehensible,” he writes.

Once the divorce was pronounced, he says he awoke with the sense that “a huge weight had been lifted”.

“I was relieved. I had feared it. I was wrong.”

He adds: “Retrospectively, I understand just how my divorce just after being elected must have unsettled the French.”

Mr Sarkozy sidesteps his current legal woes - he is facing two trials for corruption and abuse of power and campaign fraud.

He comments on just one, now closed, case in which he was acquitted to say: “I believe deeply that when one is innocent, one has nothing to fear from the light and clarity.”

On the parlous state of the party he once led, now called The Republicans, and whose latest leader resigned after scoring a piteous 8.5 per cent in European elections, he remarks: “I aspired to bring together the largest number, not to dominate the sect of my closest partisans.

"Today, sadly, I observe the totally opposite phenomenon. At the slightest disagreement, division seems to have become inevitable.”

On whether he could return to frontline politics, Mr Sarkozy says: “Often, I have been asked if today I miss politics. Invariably, I answer no and I see well that few are those who believe me. Yet it’s the truth if people bother to make the leap that it’s not politics I love, it’s life.”

But he appears to leave the door open when he adds: "You don't ask to be a saviour. You don't prepare yourself for it. You don't anticipate it.”