Carla Bruni takes a leaf out of Princess Diana’s book with undercover hospital visits

Posted by lena on Nov 19, 2009 in News | 0 comments

French First Lady Carla Bruni has been following in Princess Diana’s footsteps with a secret late-night visit to the homeless in Paris.
The former supermodel spent the night with an ambulance service attending medical emergencies on the streets of the French capital.
The revelations come 15 years after Princess Diana disguised her self in jeans and baseball cap to make late-night hospital visits in London.
Bruni, 41, has now spent an evening with Paris’s Samu Social emergency service, speaking to people living rough around Paris.
L’Express magazine, which uncovered the First Lady’s noctural visits, said she went out with the ‘Samu’ on November 9 while her husband President Nicolas Sarkozy was in Berlin to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall.
The magazine said: ‘Carla Bruni’s visits were intended to be highly discreet.
‘She went first to the headquarters of the Samu, then went out with a Samu team onto the streets of Paris.
‘She was accompanied by Samu’s founder Xavier Emmanuelli and an advisor from the Elysee Palace.’
Like Princess Diana, Ms Bruni has become well known for her charity work, especially for AIDS sufferers.
The French media is now speculating that Bruni made the late-night visit to distance herself from widespread accusations she has been ‘meddling in politics’.
Members of Sarkozy’s own UMP party told the president he was ‘under his wife’s thumb’, and warned him that voters were appalled by her support for the culture minister Frederic Mitterand after he admitted his past as a far east sex tourist.
Colleagues also accused her of urging ministers to support to film-maker Roman Polanksi, who is awaiting extradition from Switzerland to the US for having unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in 1977.
Then France’s leading society magazine described Bruni as the new Marie-Antionette, who had bewitched her husband with her left-wing views.
Last week she gave an interview to France’s Elle magazine insisting she was ‘politically incompetent’ and had no influence over her husband’s policies.
She told the magazine: ‘No one should imagine my husband is a lap-dog who allows himself to be influenced.
‘We don’t speak about politics because I have no competence at all.
‘I flick through political pages of newspapers like some people might read about football matches.
‘I’ll give my opinion if he wants it, but he never asks me about precise issues because I know nothing.’
French media commentator David Verges said yesterday: ‘If she goes out at night too many times, it will not long before the media begin calling Bruni the new Princess Diana.
‘She is clearly capable of keeping her night-time charity work secret if she had wished, and no doubt wanted the public to know about it to distract attention from recent bad publicity about her influencing her husband’s politics.
‘The visits with the Samu probably made with the best intentions, but whatever she does, the president’s wife will always attract criticism.’
source: dailymail.co.uk