IT TAKES a messy love life to put fire into the belly of a French president. At least that is how it seemed on January 14th, when President François Hollande, a Socialist, upturned the prevailing doctrine on the French left and promised cuts in both public spending and taxes, in order to help businesses create jobs and revive growth. He may have been emboldened by indignation, if not new love. Just four days previously, Closer, a celebrity magazine, had stunned France by publishing claims of a liaison between Mr Hollande and Julie Gayet, a French film actress.

The magazine’s seven-page report included photographs of a figure in a crash helmet on the back of a scooter, driven by a security guard, arriving at an apartment building just across the street from the Elysée Palace. They also showed Ms Gayet turning up at the same address; and then the helmeted figure, wearing a pair of shiny black shoes that Closer said could only be Mr Hollande’s, leaving the building the next morning. The president did not deny the allegations, but said he “deplored the breach of respect for his private life”. The first lady, Valérie Trierweiler, a journalist at Paris-Match magazine, was then taken to hospital with exhaustion.

Before the story broke Mr Hollande had begun to lay out a new economic policy, after 18 months dominated by tax rises and subsidised job creation. So his press conference in the Elysée banqueting hall on January 14th turned into a weird attempt to keep the focus on his new policy, ducking the question most people wanted answered. Of his private life, Mr Hollande conceded only that he was going through a “painful moment”. Ms Trierweiler was “resting”, and he would clarify who was now the first lady before a state visit to America on February 11th.

With talk of scooters and love-nests thus banished, Mr Hollande got back to his other pastime, fiscal policy. Except that this week, he came bearing not tax increases but cuts, as part of a proposed “pact of responsibility”. The biggest novelty was a promised €30 billion ($41 billion) yearly cut in social charges on companies, achieved by ending compulsory contributions to family benefits by 2017. This would be financed, he said, not by extra taxes elsewhere but by budget savings worth €53 billion over the next three years.

This was what Pierre Gattaz, head of Medef, the employers’ federation, has been urging for months—although he wants payroll charges cut by €50 billion. To the consternation of his party’s left, Mr Hollande declared that only businesses could create new jobs and revive growth. Acknowledging for the first time that he was a moderate social democrat, Mr Hollande said there was “no time to lose”, because France’s “destiny” was at stake.

If Mr Hollande at last sounds like a leader who knows what needs to be done to repair France’s economic weaknesses, it will be a different matter to translate words into deeds. As it is, this is supply-side economics à la française. Mr Hollande promises, for instance, an “observatory of counter-guarantees”, to check that business keeps its side of the pact and creates jobs, which sounds Orwellian and unworkable.

The detail of budget cuts is also sketchy. Although French public spending, at 57% of GDP, is the highest in the euro zone, Mr Hollande only hinted at where savings would be made, such as in health care and local government. Moreover, as Guillaume Menuet, an economist at Citibank, points out, the extra savings promised to finance the new payroll-tax cuts will in reality only be worth €10 billion, since Mr Hollande plans to merge this tax cut with another already planned for business that is worth €20 billion by 2015.

For the moment, most of Mr Hollande’s party has welcomed the plan, although Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a firebrand ex-Socialist left-winger, denounced it as “right-wing”. It is less clear whether it will counterbalance Mr Hollande’s loss of credibility over his tangled private life. Although 77% of the French say they consider this a purely private matter, copies of Closer have flown off the shelves, and the French airwaves have been filled with little else.

Mr Hollande is not married to Ms Trierweiler (nor was he to Ségolène Royal, mother of his four children and herself the Socialist presidential candidate in 2007), so this is not an extra-marital affair in the fine French presidential tradition. But it is still awkward, since Ms Trierweiler was given taxpayer-funded staff and treated as first lady. “At the very least, it makes him look ridiculous,” says one business leader. With his poll ratings at a record low and a new economic policy to defend, that is an image that Mr Hollande can ill afford.