Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Anne Sinclair

GSTAAD—It’s been very sunny and hot, with the bluest of blue skies above and the greenest of green mountains around me. It does not get any better than this. The farmers have cut their grass and packed it for the winter’s feed, soon the cows will be coming down from the hills, and the Swiss franc will continue going through the roof. Life is now so expensive in Switzerland, even the rich are starting to complain. Sixty greenbacks for a grilled cheese in a top hotel’s terrace is a bit steep unless one has access to the Gaddafi sovereign wealth fund, which I am sure some Swiss bankers do. Still, I know worse places to be: the Hamptons during Labor Day weekend; in Tripoli before the mongrel dog and his syphilitic children cut and ran to Algeria; and if one’s really unlucky, at the Carlton Hotel terrace in Cannes, watching rich Russian slobs guzzling warm champagne in the afternoon sun.

For the moment I’m sitting pretty on my lawn, trying to make some mischief. I failed to do so last week by announcing Saif Gaddafi’s arrival at the Palace hotel. No one in their right mind took it seriously—not even the hacks, who twenty years ago believed me when I wrote that Mrs. Saddam Hussein had moved in for the duration. Back then, journalists arrived and began snooping around. The Palace’s owner, Ernst Scherz, a very old friend, found it amusing and refused to deny it. The hacks drank copiously at the bar and everything was hunky-dory until the powers back home froze their expense accounts. Gildo, the greatest maître d’ ever, still talks about it when he’s not singing arias from Don Giovanni, which he knows by heart.

Which brings me to a Don Giovanni wannabe: the froglike DSK, newly free to seduce more good lookers from Africa and its environs. There’s not much I’ve ever disagreed with in Stephen Glover’s writings except for his recent description of that phony socialist pig’s wife as a tolerant French woman because “her class and background” require it. Actually, it is she who wants France’s top prize even more than the short fat man with bulging eyes and oversized ego. Let’s not forget that DSK’s first wife got him connected with the right people in les Grandes Écoles, which landed him his first good job as a lecturer. After that he used his second wife to get him in tight with the civil servants who steered him and recommended him to eventually become Minister of Finance. Now his third good job—being a billionaire—is financing his bid for France’s top spot. Anne Sinclair is no babe in the woods. She resigned her popular TV chat show when her pig husband was appointed a minister, claiming it might be a conflict of interest. It was nothing of the sort. She had inside info that the show was about to be canceled, so she bailed and ended up looking more honest than Honest Abe—who was dishonest as hell, incidentally.