French president François Hollande joined the long list of senior politicians who have ended up victims of staged photo stunts that went horribly wrong.
This image of him apparently gurning during a discussion on school reform in a classroom in northern France went viral on Facebook and Twitter after news agencies withdrew it from circulation.
Many senior British political leaders have seen their reputations defined by pictures captured in an unguarded fraction of a second.
David Miliband never recovered his status as the Labour leader-in-waiting after the notorious shot of him awkwardly brandishing a banana in 2008 that made voters feel he was even less a “man of the people” than Gordon Brown.
William Hague’s Tory Party PR advisers must have thought it was an inspired idea to put their then-leader in a baseball cap during a visit to a theme park in 2000. The stunt backfired, with one commentator describing him as looking like “a child molester on a day-release scheme”.
His predecessor John Major fared little better on a visit to Pakistan in 1997 when he wore a hat that did nothing to dispel his public reputation as a bit of a wally.
