PARIS LETTER: The front-page newspaper headlines must be driving fellow cabinet ministers of Nicolas Sarkozy crazy, writes Lara Marlowe.
"The best known minister on every front; the unavoidable Mr Sarkozy" (France Soir); "How Sarkozy is building his networks" (Le Monde on Monday); "Sarkozy shakes up the right" (Le Monde on Tuesday); "Sarko show" (Libération); and my favourite: "Sleep tight, Sarko is watching over you" (Le Parisien).
On Sunday night, I heard a friend's 26-year-old daughter praising the hardline interior minister. Bénédicte is a fashionable young woman who books concerts for pop singers. A few years ago, you'd have expected to find her at a young socialists' rally.
"Sarko's great! Imagine: he broke the lorry-drivers' strike in less than a day and he shut down [the centre for immigrants at\] Sangatte!"
Also on Sunday, Mr Sarkozy's ministry announced that French crime statistics for November decreased 5.28 per cent compared to November 2001.
An opinion poll published on Monday showed that 66 per cent of French people approve of Mr Sarkozy's performance since he became the country's deputy prime minister and top law-enforcement officer in May. It was long thought to be the worst job in government because crime statistics had reached astronomical heights and police were demoralised.
Attempts to address the problem often led to accusations of racism and pandering to the extreme right.
On Monday night, Mr Sarkozy took on a dozen politicians and journalists in a two-hour live television broadcast.
Nearly six million French people tuned in - 770,000 more than bothered to watch the Prime Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin, on the same programme in September. "Long live politics!" the left-wing Le Monde's editorial said, praising the right-wing minister for proving "that it's possible to talk about politics on prime-time television without boring viewers".
Mr Sarkozy willingly walked into the lions' den; the high point was his encounter with the extreme right-wing National Front leader, Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen.
President Jacques Chirac had refused to debate with him when they competed in the presidential run-off in May, Mr Le Pen noted.
He praised Mr Sarkozy for accepting, then called him "a dynamic, sympathetic and active man". However the interior minister was failing to address the "real problem" of "massive immigration", Mr Le Pen said. "By getting rid of Sangatte, the minister allowed the cancer to develop all over France."
Mr Sarkozy (47) seized the opportunity to distance himself from the extreme right's hobby horse - immigration.
"I don't believe in a new Maginot line," he said, reminding Mr Le Pen, (74), that he is old enough to remember the useless fortifications that failed to protect France in the second World War.
Mr Le Pen then complained that juris solis enables foreign women to have babies in France "and make little Frenchmen". Again, Mr Sarkozy disagreed strongly.
The idea that citizenship was a right transmitted through "purity of blood" was dangerous, he said.
"My father was foreign, my mother French - would I be French? My grandfather on my mother's side was foreign. Would I be pure enough? . . . If citizenship depended on blood, I wouldn't be French - and wouldn't that be a pity!"
Mr Sarkozy's father was a Hungarian aristocrat named Pal Bosca y Sarkozy who ran away to join the French Foreign Legion rather than serve the Warsaw Pact.
His mother's father, Benedict Mallah, was a Jew from Salonica who married a French woman and converted to Catholicism. None of the family has ever practised Judaism in France, but Mr Sarkozy says he receives anti-Semitic letters.
His tall, handsome father married four times and Mr Sarkozy has said he was shaped by an unhappy childhood. He was only 20 when he joined Mr Chirac's neo-Gaullist party in 1975, the year it was founded.
Eight years later, Mr Sarkozy stole the mayor's office in Paris's richest suburb, Neuilly, from his mentor, Charles Pasqua. He was such a close friend of the Chirac family that Mr Chirac's daughter Claude asked him to be her witness when she married in 1992.
Three years later, however, Mr Sarkozy sided with Edouard Balladur against Mr Chirac, a betrayal for which he is still paying.
Every evening, Mr Sarkozy runs around the gardens of the interior ministry. He and his second wife, Cecilia, are inseparable. She has an office in the ministry and is totally devoted to her husband's career. The couple count France's top businessmen and bankers - Bernard Arnault, Martin Bouygues, Michel Pébereau, Daniel Bouton, Francois Pinault - among their close friends.
If drive and ambition are the most important criteria for success in politics, then Nicolas Sarkozy stands a serious chance of realising his ambition to be president or prime minister.