As Hillary Clinton gets bitter in a televised TV debate with Barack Obama, the singer Amy Winehouse is frolicking on a beach in the Caribbean with her ex-boyfriend. Who do you think does more to further the cause of women?

Most would probably say Hillary. She was (and some may say still is) likely to become the first ever female president of the US. She strides around making important speeches and leaves men quaking in her wake. Amy, on the other hand, is a drug addict lunatic with a husband in jail and more tattoos than David Beckham.

My view is that women like Hillary do more damage to women’s causes than men do. She has become worse than a man. She is more aggressive, more strident and totally charmless. Just because you’re in a position of power, there’s no need to give up being a warm and attractive (even sexy) person. Her husband certainly didn’t. Here in France we saw a similar change (although not nearly as bad) in Segolene Royal. In the end Sarko outpolled her among women, as Obama has just done to Hillary in the US.

Amy may be flawed and faithless. But she is pure woman. She is talented and successful and behaving badly. In her song You Know I’m No Good she says “Upstairs in bed with my ex boy, he’s in a place but I can’t get joy”. This may all have changed now.

But the point is that women are not fooled by a woman trying to be a man. That’s not what we want when we talk about the first female president. We want a first WOMAN president, not some pastiche of a man whom we hate on sight. If Hillary were a touch more like Amy (or even Bill) we would like her a lot more, chinks and all.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2008

“Are you a goer?” I overheard a man asking at a party the other evening. The man posing the question was my husband. The person he was addressing was my friend and business partner Mary. I agree that with her tight red dress and hair curly as kale she was looking particularly festive, but I did wonder if this question were appropriate. My normal response would have been to flirt outrageously with the best-looking man in the room, but as our kind hosts were gay, all the good-looking men were looking for equally good-looking men, and not wasting so much as a glance in my direction. I resolved to ask Rupert about this comment on the way home.

“I heard you ask Mary if she was a goer?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I know it looks bad. But there is a perfectly good explanation. I was explaining to her my theory of parties. Parties are made up of two kinds of people: those who want to go home early and those who want to stay late. The problem is, they are normally married to each other, which leads to aggravation. So what I wanted to know from Mary was this: are you a stayer or are you a goer?”

Hmm. Neat explanation. Or perhaps I am getting very French in my suspicions. Here we are all agog at the news of the liaison between Carla Bruni and Sarko. She clearly is a goer. When she decided that she must have Raphael Enthoven, a philosopher, it was of little concern to her that a) he was married and b) she, Carla, was living with Raphael’s father at the time. Along with the usual conquests such as Mick Jagger (while he was married to Jerry Hall) and Eric Clapton, she also dated Francois Fillon, the French prime minister. This is probably not the first occasion that the French president and prime minister have shared the same squeeze, but it’s definitely the first time that the French public have been made aware of it. While we haven’t been at too many parties this season – Rupert and I shared an office lunch - no streamers, no dancing, very little snogging – we have been invited to Christmas Eve with our wine-making friends Jean-Claude and Alexandra in their chateau. Nervous as we are about the police and their breathalysers, I phoned Jean-Claude to ask him what time we should book a taxi for.

I was already quite nervous about this: according to one friend, the French go first to Midnight Mass, then party on afterwards. As a girl who likes to be in bed by ten o’clock at the latest, this is disheartening news. Jean-Claude suggested various times for the taxi, then said:

“It’s all too complicated. You must stay.”

So, it’s official. Rupert and I are both stayers. Although he points out that perhaps it is possible to be a goer and a stayer. I will question him further on this issue. In the meantime Merry Christmas!