They underestimated Marine Le Pen, now leading the Euro polls at 24pc. The socialists have slipped to third place. She has outflanked them with her brand of "Left Le Penisme" - or the Left-leaning side of Charles de Gaulle, as she once old me - a tooth and claw defence of the welfare state and the sacred Modèle Français. They have no answer to her attacks on "senseless austerity" and the "mad monetary policies of the ECB" that are hollowing out the industrial core of France, or to her taunt that the EMU project has become coterminous with mass unemployment, because they are all true.