I've only listened to about five minutes of news on the radio today but in that time I have heard a number of clichés being used to refer to head of the IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is headline news today.
He was described as a champagne socialist, and also by the French equivalent - gauche caviar, or 'caviar left'. These pejorative terms refer to leftwingers with plenty of money and a taste for the good things of life to boot. Another French term used on the BBC's one o'clock bulletin was chaud lapin or 'hot rabbit', which evokes quite a different picture to the English equivalents ladies' man or Don Juan.
The slightly more erudite phrase 'a Metternich with a BlackBerry' was used in both the eight o'clock and one o'clock bulletins put out on BBC Radio 4. This is a reference to the important 19th-century German-Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich. Strauss-Kahn is also said to have used masterful skills of diplomacy to persuade the IMF to bail out debt-ridden countries in Europe.
Lastly, Professor Ngaire Woods of Oxford University used a phrase in an interview just after the eight o'clock news bulletin this morning on the BBC Today programme. Considering the situation from an American perspective, she described the idea of a European running an organisation whose biggest borrower was Europe as being like 'a fox in charge of the hen-house'.
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