WHEN a British television show, Top Gear, was marketed to the French a few years ago, it seemed an improbable proposition. The hit programme, which appeals to petrol heads and the nation’s inner laddishness, was not an obvious fit for Gallic sensibilities. More improbable still, when the French version was launched in 2015, was the choice of an early special guest, whose challenge is to set the fastest time possible when driving an ordinary car round a race track: it was the rather dour, besuited, centre-right former prime minister, François Fillon.

As it turned out, Mr Fillon, who is now the Republicans’ beleaguered presidential candidate, did rather well. Strapped into a specially adapted Dacia Sandero, equipped with a crash helmet and an internally mounted camera recording his every move, Mr Fillon was unerringly calm and focused at the wheel. His lap time earned him a highly respectable fourth place. Fillon devotees were not surprised. He is an amateur racing driver; his brother, Pierre, runs the 24-hour race at Le Mans, which lies in his rural former constituency of La Sarthe, in western France. For anybody else struggling today to understand why Mr Fillon has defied insistent calls from his own team to quit the French presidential race, despite a judicial investigation into alleged misuse of the parliamentary payroll, his Top Gear appearance offers an insight. This is a man who—alone, impervious to distraction, unafraid of risk, and under pressure—has an unwavering faith in his capacity to hold steady and make it over the finishing line.

Mr Fillon’s troubles have turned an election that was difficult for the centre-right to lose into one that will be difficult to win. Last November, the politician once mocked as Mr Nobody surged from poll outsider to grab his party’s nomination, with a sweeping 67% of centre-right voters. Overnight, Mr Fillon became the favourite in the election on April 23rd and May 7th. The sitting Socialist president, François Hollande, was so unpopular that he bowed out before he was pushed. L’alternance, or the habitual rotation of power between the left and the right, meant that centre-right politicians just assumed it was their turn.

Such expectations have now collapsed. Investigative judges say they will put Mr Fillon under formal investigation on March 15th over alleged fake jobs for his Welsh-born wife, Penelope, and two of his children. The sums were bad enough. The payroll bill over the years came to €900,000 ($949,000); the average pre-tax annual salary is €20,670. But there was also an uncomfortable sense of feudal entitlement about the affair. The tweedy Mr Fillon lives in a historic manor house in La Sarthe, complete with chapel and horse. Paris-Match once published a photo of him, a practising Catholic, and his large family, taking tea on its sweeping lawn. Worse, Mr Fillon insisted on his own reputation for probity. As disillusion grew, and his poll numbers sank, Mr Fillon dug in. It was a conspiracy, he exclaimed, fingering the usual suspects: the media, the left, even the judiciary. The people, he cried to die-hard supporters at a hastily organised weekend rally in Paris, had chosen him; they would be his judge. Mr Fillon hit the most discordant note of all when he sought to mimic the grandiose oratory of Charles de Gaulle, whose photo he kept on his bedroom wall as a child. “France”, he declared, “is greater than my errors.”

Nothing, it now seems, will deflect Mr Fillon from his course. Not the loss of his campaign manager, Patrick Stefanini, nor his spokesman, Thierry Solère, nor the scores of deputies who have also quit his campaign team. Defeat in the first round, said Mr Stefanini, could no longer be ruled out. In their despair over the weekend, defectors appealed to the primary’s runner-up, Alain Juppé, another ex-prime minister, to take over as candidate. Somehow, anyhow. But Mr Fillon was having none of it. It was all “too late”, an embittered Mr Juppé replied: Mr Fillon had a boulevard in front of him, but has driven into a dead end.

Besides the harm done to the image of democratic politics, one casualty of this sorry saga is an ambitious economic programme, gone to waste. For all his flaws, Mr Fillon grasps the need to shake up France’s rule-bound system to free up the creation of jobs, ideas and profits. He knows, having served as prime minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy, that reforms need to be spelled out before an election in order to secure a mandate to put them into place afterwards. But the damage now done to his credibility is such that, even were he to defy the odds and win, Mr Fillon would lack the authority to do what he has promised.

Tragédie française

Another is political unity on the French right. When Jacques Chirac stood for re-election in 2002, he brought rival cliques from the centre and the right together under a broad umbrella, originally named the Union for a Presidential Majority (UMP). It helped him in the run-off, where he roundly beat Jean-Marie Le Pen, of the nativist National Front. Today, Mr Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, is likely to reach the second round, and Mr Fillon needs to keep those same constituent parts together in order to make it as well. Instead, the centrists are wavering. Many centre-right figures around Mr Juppé have quit the campaign. Mr Fillon is left with the socially conservative right wing, whose most organised element is a Catholic movement that mobilised vigorously against the legalisation of gay marriage.

This spectacle has blown the wheels off one of the few credible efforts to keep Ms Le Pen out of the Elysée. “If it’s a choice between Fillon and Le Pen, I’ll abstain,” said a retired Socialist voter in Angers, a cathedral town near his rural fief. The stakes are higher than at any other election since de Gaulle established the Fifth Republic in 1958. Mr Fillon may think he can still make the final lap. But hopes of defeating Ms Le Pen are increasingly turning instead to a young centrist untested behind the wheel, Emmanuel Macron. And he, against all the unwritten rules of French politics, has never run for election to any office before.