Some individual remarks: Dominique Bussereau is Raffarin's man, but was accounted a very efficient minister in the last government, and may owe his position to that (at least partly). He's back handling Transport, which is his speciality. Trouble is, his speciality is supporting aviation. This to me doesn't look like it offers hope of a more intelligent attitude to transportation, and looks like an element of proof (if needed) that Borloo's ecological maxi-ministry is there for show.

Like other economic liberals from the UDF/UMP (Alain Madelin, Gérard Longuet, Patrick Devedjian), Hervé Novelli was a founding member of the 1960s street-fighting extreme-right group Occident.

Roselyne Bachelot recently said she refused to celebrate Mother's Day, as her mother had taught her, because it was founded during the war by Pétain as part of the Vichy notion of woman and her proper place. That was good - but when Sarkozy came out with his deliberate reminder of Vichy (the Ministry for Immigration and National Identity) she didn't bat an eyelid.