Don’t panic... France may get Welsh First Lady

FRANCE’S Elysee Palace is the epitome of glitz and glamour – hosting well-heeled dignitaries at dinner parties all year round.

But soon it could be home to a softly spoken grandmother from Wales who shuns the limelight, potters around in gardening clothes and describes herself as a ‘country peasant’.

Penelope Fillon, 61, a solicitor’s daughter from Abergavenny, is a world away from the first lady image encapsulated by former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s model wife Carla Bruni.

But she has been thrust into the spotlight after her husband

Francois emerged as the surprise front-runner to lead the Republican party at next year’s crucial presidential elections. Mr Fillon, a former prime minister, won a stunning victory against his former boss Mr Sarkozy last week. It is expected that the committed Anglophile (pictured here with Penelope) will be confirmed as the conservative candidate in a final vote tonight – which would make him the favourite to win next year’s election. Mrs Fillon, born Penelope Clarke, was the eldest of five children of solicitor Colin Clarke, an Englishman, and his Welsh wife Glenys. She studied English, French and German A-levels at the local King Henry VIII Grammar School, then a degree in French and German at University College London.

Penelope met her husband, then a law student, during her final degree year which she spent as a teaching assistant at a middle school in Le Mans. They married in 1980 and have five children and four grandchildren.

Curiously, Francois’s brother Pierre is married to Penelope’s sister Jane.

Francois and his wife live in an idyllic 12th Century chateau in Sarthe but they could swap that for the Elysee Palace if he wins next May.

‘I can’t imagine living in the Elysee,’ Mrs Fillon said yesterday.

A fluent French speaker, she has shunned the gilded lifestyles of the Paris elite.

She said she hoped she could ‘bring a bit of British humour’ to the role of the president’s wife.

‘I’m just a country peasant, this is not my natural habitat,’ she told one interviewer.

‘I am not a Paris party animal… When I’m at our country home, I can go out in old trousers and it doesn’t matter because the locals think, “Oh, she’s just one of those English gardening types.”’