Faced with renewed allegations that Moammar Gadhafi had poured up to €50 million into his presidential campaign in 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally lost it.
"If he did (finance my election), I wasn't very grateful," he snapped on prime-time television.
Sarkozy, after all, was the prime mover of the bombing campaign that brought Gadhafi down, while the man who made the original accusation during that war was Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, the late Libyan dictator's son and hardly an impartial witness. It was mainly a measure of how much Sarkozy is disliked in France that he had to go on major French television channels once again to deny the eight-month-old story.