French television is such fun this week.

On screen is the political elite being vox-popped outside the Elysee Palace, patrician smiles curdling as politicians of all hues realise they've been "got". The gloves are off. The deference and understanding they expect, nay demand, from their long-tamed media pack has seemingly gone. Just like that. "What do you think of the book? Have you read the extracts? Will you be ordering it?"

The questions come thick and fast and the politicians dodge and weave, hoping their faces show merely total disdain as they answer: "I know nothing about it. I will not be reading it. Private life in France should be just that - private." Quotes from the book are read out to them but they mask their faces and walk quickly away with a courteous if cowardly "merci".

How many, I wonder, are thinking, "Hollande today, me tomorrow"? For there are many skeletons rustling in the closets of the Elysee, undisturbed thanks to a previously craven press and fierce privacy laws only recently challenged by magazines such as Closer.

The book is Thank You For This Moment, an at-times toe-curling, bodice-ripping account of the nine-year relationship Valerie Trierweiler had with Francois Hollande, our most unpopular president ever, 18 months of which were spent by his side in the Elysee.

Its publication has been timed with exquisite, cruel precision to further humiliate and ridicule Hollande, who presides over a country in turmoil politically and financially, and whose watch has seen unemployment soar and anger spill out on to the streets.

Sniffily, male pundits dismiss it as the bitter outpourings of a woman scorned, the last throw of the rejected mistress, hell-bent for revenge. Fair enough. Whichever way you dress it up, that is just what it is.

At times, from the exclusive extracts published in Paris Match magazine, for which Trierweiler works, it seems as if she rushed from bedroom to notebook, pausing merely to grab a pen. As I say often here: everything is copy to a journalist, harsh as that might be to lovers, family and friends.

For a political hack, though, she sure produces some messy, purple prose. She writes of her "passionate, possessive, mad love for this man whom I loved, who made me laugh, and who destabilised me deliciously". She admits being "hysterically jealous" of Segolene Royal, Hollande's former partner and the mother of his four children. Dramatically, she describes swallowing pill after pill when faced with the headlines of his affaire with the actress Julie Gayet.

I've tried hard to see Hollande as Trierweiler saw him but all I see is a dull, over-promoted middle manager with a penchant for baggy trousers and scooters. She, on the other hand, is an intelligent and undeniably good-looking woman, albeit an unpopular one with former colleagues and Elysee staff. She was not nicknamed the Rottweiler for nothing.

In time perhaps her painting of Hollande as a cold, obsessively ambitious, cynical, lying cheat will fade a little. The French are very tolerant of flawed men. What will not fade and will probably give the coup de grace to any lingering hopes for re-election is her revelation that the socialist who famously said: "I hate the rich" is a snob with little time for the poor, his electors. After a Christmas with Trierweiler's working-class family he described them as "not very nice".

"He stood for election as a man who does not like the rich. In reality the president does not like the poor. He, the man of the left, calls them the toothless ones. He is very proud of his humour."

One could almost hear the death bells tolling for M Flamby - as Hollande is often nicknamed - particularly in La France Profonde. It was his Marie Antoinette moment.

The day after the revelations there was a demonstration in Paris, where banners proclaimed: "We may be toothless but at least we have balls." Many had blacked out their teeth to smile for the cameras and social media had a glorious romp with numerous pictures of a gummy president.

The book, which rose straight to the top of Amazon's French charts on release, may also be the final breach of the previously impregnable, though latterly cracking, wall between the elite and the rest of France.

The young, accustomed as they are to all information being accessible, will no longer play this French game of privacy for the privileged. They demand detail and knowledge, however tawdry at times. Like it or not, social media has killed privacy.

Reactionary France holds out against so much: in some cases, such as the preservation of its culture, rightly so; in others, such as its blind protectionism policy and suffocating business practices, wrongly so. It can no longer hold out against an internet which has no respect for barriers.

One could almost feel sorry for the beleaguered Hollande. Almost. Until another telling phrase from Trierweiler. She says he desperately tried to get her back and told her he needed her (while still seeing Gayet, mind you) and that he would win her back as if it were an election.

Ah, the vanity of the man. Well, he lost Trierweiler and unless there's an economic miracle he will lose the real thing.