Rachida Dati: Moi? For President? Why not...

Sitting in her large leather chair behind her large mayoral desk, Rachida Dati appears slight and sparrow-like. Frail, even.

As a first impression, it is utterly deceptive. Madame le Maire may be small and smiling, but her reputation goes before her; the handshake is firm, the bonjour is brisk, and the semaphore message from her heavily kohled eyes carries the severity of an especially strict headmistress.

This is Dati’s office in the town hall of her current fiefdom, Paris’ chic 7th arrondissement. It may be a step down from her previous job as justice minister, but is still a universe away from the banlieue where she grew up one of 12 children of illiterate north African immigrés.

With a combination of ambition and brazen opportunism, Dati clawed her way out of the gritty housing estates to the highest offices of state. Her rise was as brave and extraordinary as her fall was brutal and swift.

Today, despite being written off by many after she was dumped by President Nicolas Sarkozy two years ago (she insists she wanted to quit), Dati, once described as the nearest thing France has to Obama, has given her strongest hint yet that she is on her way to the top.

First, she intends to get elected as an MP in her local Paris constituency. Then, she wants to become Mayor of Paris, a well-established stepping stone to the Elysée Palace. After that…?

Asked if she can envisage becoming president one day, she prevaricates (“It’s complicated… it doesn’t work like that”). When pressed, she admits: “Why not, if I can do something for my country?

“I said I wanted to stand for parliament, and look at the revolt it has caused. Imagine what would happen if tomorrow I said I’m a candidate for the presidential election. Even if people say it is a good idea. Even if I am popular. Even if I’m afraid of nothing. France is ready for a woman president, but the French political class is not.

“Still, if someone had said a few years ago that someone from a poor, immigrant family, and a woman too, would become justice minister, everyone would have said 'impossible’.”

Dati was among a raft of women, some from ethnic minority backgrounds, catapulted into government posts when Nicolas Sarkozy was elected in 2007.

Nicknamed the Sarkozettes – the Gallic equivalent of Blair’s Babes with added glamour – they were symbols of what Sarkozy, himself an immigrant’s son, promoted as “open and diverse” government. Dati was held up to show what the disadvantaged could do if they set their minds to it.

Then the economic crisis struck and changed the political mood. Mr Sarkozy no longer wanted new and diverse, he wanted traditional and safe. Four and a half years on, most of these women have gone.

“Politics is about symbols, and in a time of crisis people return to what they know best,” says Dati. “But I’m not pessimistic about this. The women and the diversity will come back.”

From day one in the cabinet, Dati, the most loyal of Sarkozy’s foot soldiers, provoked unusual bile. Her chief of staff and several other office members resigned, suggesting she was impossible to work with. Her legal reforms sparked a strike by magistrates, and her hard-line proposals – including the jailing of 12-year-old delinquents – brought further opprobrium.

She took flak for her penchant for designer clothes and vertiginous heels. When she appeared on the cover of Paris Match wearing a Christian Dior dress, she was accused of getting too big for her own bottes and forgetting her roots.

Behind the political scenes, she lost an ally when Sarkozy split from his second wife Cécilia – who regarded Dati “like a sister” – to be replaced by Carla Bruni, who saw her more as a troublesome rival.

Then she became pregnant and refused to name the child’s father. Five days after her daughter Zohra was born, Dati donned her highest heels and snappiest suit and returned to work, enraging both the feminists and yummy mummy brigade in equal measure.

“I have never spoken about my intimate life before, and I’m not going to start now,” she says spikily when asked, though more than one political pundit has suggested this coyness is contrived.

Dati admits her strict Muslim father refused to speak to her during her pregnancy, and such was the frenzy of speculation over the child’s paternity that José Mariá Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister, made an astonishing public denial.

Away from the political fray, Dati believes the vitriol stemmed from contempt for her impoverished, foreign roots. “Nobody criticised Christine Lagarde [the new head of the IMF] when she wore a Chanel suit, but I wore a Dior dress and got attacked. It was just an ordinary work dress,” she says of the Paris Match row. “Are people saying I shouldn’t wear nice clothes, have my hair done, wear make-up, be feminine? I have always considered femininity to be part of my identity. When you represent the institutions and dignity of your country, you don’t dress in a sack.”

Describing a couture creation as “just an ordinary dress” is disingenuous, but Dati is capable of a startling lack of self-awareness, self-doubt or even introspection. In writing and in person, she seems incapable of accepting she might have misjudged a situation or mood; that she might quite simply be wrong.

To combat the “lies and insults”, she has recently published her memoirs: Rachida Dati: Daughter of M’Barek and Fatim-Zohra. Minister of Justice. The book, described by one French journalist colleague as “relentless self-promotion”, charts Dati’s rise through the Paris corridors of power. She emerges as complex, contradictory and compulsively controlling.

Born in November 1965, the second daughter of a Muslim bricklayer from Morocco and Algerian mother – neither of whom could read or write – her first home in east-central France had a wood stove for heating and an outside lavatory.

Rachida and her elder sister were enrolled in a private Catholic school, their father working overtime to pay the fees. He rejected free lessons or hand-outs, insisting his children should be “treated like others”.

Dati admits she was difficult: she worked hard at school, but scrapped with her siblings and other children, was stubborn and was frequently punished by teachers for answering back. “Rachida,” wrote the nuns in a report to her mother, “is not an easy child.” She retorts that she simply did not like childhood. “It wasn’t that I was unhappy, but I just didn’t find it interesting.”

She writes of daily encounters with her housing estate neighbours – “haggard people who didn’t take care of themselves… slovenly men who spent their days in front of the television; idle youngsters in the hall…”

At 14, she was selling Avon products door-to-door. Then, aged 16, Dati describes how she was shocked to discover she was not French. “I was born in France. I had grown up in France. French was my mother tongue. France was the only country of which I knew the history and geography by heart. And suddenly, I discover I am the child of two foreigners. How could this be possible?”

She began studying medicine but switched to economics because the course was “quicker”, then did business studies and later magistrates’ school. To pay for her studies, and she claims those of her siblings, she worked in a supermarket.

Jamal Dati, 38, one of her four younger brothers, and the family’s black sheep, described her as “extremely authoritarian”.

“You have to do what she says,” he wrote in another book in which, among other things, he accused his sister of “dishonouring” the Muslim family by being an unmarried mother.

Later, when justice minister, Dati faced embarrassment after Jamal was convicted of drug dealing. More recently, he was jailed for beating up a former girlfriend.

Jamal’s experience confirmed her belief in tough-love punishment for young delinquents. “My family knew nothing about drugs or addiction. We were not prepared. And for my brother, the punishment arrived too late.

“His suffering caused huge pain for my family. It was a descent into hell. Can you imagine what it is like to sign the papers for your brother to be interned in a psychiatric hospital, as I had to do?” Jamal views it differently, saying he needed support, not sectioning.

When their mother fell ill with the cancer that would kill her in 2001, Dati took control. She consulted specialists and told nobody, not even her father, how ill she was. When a younger sister recounts the distress this caused, Dati brushes the criticism aside.

Unsurprisingly, her career has been one of perpetual forward motion, making contacts in high places to achieve her next goal. She says she has no role models – when pressed, she admits admiring Margaret Thatcher’s “courage” – or regrets. Although no longer Sarkozy’s darling, she won’t say a word against her former mentor, who sent her to the

Gallic equivalent of Coventry by making her a Euro MP.

But it is when talking about her daughter Zohra, now two, that Dati’s studied solipsism vanishes and she reveals the chink in her otherwise impenetrable armour. It is also the only time she abandons the BlackBerry she has been glancing at throughout the interview.

On her desk, the immature artworks of a toddler stick out from a pile of files. “Zohra tells me I’m in the pictures. I can’t see it myself, but she points to a splodge and says, 'That’s you, Mama.’ ” Her expression, once described unkindly as a “Plexiglass smile” is unchanged, but the eyes have softened.

Having come late to motherhood – she was 43 when her daughter was born – Dati says her child is now the cornerstone of her life. “It’s complicated juggling but I’m not going to complain. It’s easier for me than for many women, and it’s just a question of organisation.”

She insists her story is no poverty-to-power fairytale or that it is extraordinary. Her strategy has been to decide what she wants, then ask for it on the basis that “I have nothing to lose”.

It is a modus operandi that could see Madame le Maire become Madame le Président.