Chirac Keeps Quiet Over Hearing Aid

President Jacques Chirac has gone slightly deaf in one ear, it has emerged, sparking a debate in France about how far a head of state should be expected to come clean about his infirmities.

The weekly news magazine L'Express said a cabinet minister had confirmed that a small hearing aid had been fitted discreetly into Mr Chirac's left ear.

Mr Chirac's impediment is a problem for France not because the fact that he is hard of hearing in any way disqualifies him from doing his job, but because he seems to have decided to keep quiet about it.

The late President François Mitterrand concealed the cancer that eventually killed him from his electorate for 14 years by ordering that all references be deleted from his annual medical report - a decision most French people see as fundamentally dishonest and undemocratic.

One leading constitutionalist, Guy Carcassonne, has proposed that a team of doctors, bound by professional secrecy, should examine the president regularly and report their findings to the Constitutional Council, France's highest institutional authority, whose "wise men" could then decide what to do with the diagnosis. His suggestion, unfortunately, has yet to be widely heard.