Pierre Mongin, 51, a friend and civil servant who is blamed by many MPs for the Prime Minister?s policy failures during his year in office, landed the post of chief of the RATP, the transport monopoly that runs the Metro and buses of Paris. Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister and de Villepin foe, calls M Mongin the Prime Minister?s ?partner in crime?.

The ?waltz of the bosses?, as it was dubbed by the media, was triggered by the shake-up of management at EADS, the Franco-German parent of the troubled Airbus company. The exercise was a classic case of the State placing its high servants in top industrial jobs.

Many of the cast are, like M de Villepin and President Chirac, graduates of the cole Nationale d?Administration (ENA), the elite postgraduate school for mandarins. Seven of the past ten Prime Ministers and two of the past three Presidents studied there.

The French state, holder of a 15 per cent stake in EADS, is not supposed to interfere in the company?s management, but this did not prevent M de Villepin from orchestrating a shake-up that removed Noel Foregard, the corporation?s co-chief executive. M Foregard, a former civil servant and long-standing prot? of M Chirac, was forced to carry the can for failures at Airbus and for profiting from the sale of stock last March when trouble was brewing.

To replace him, France sent in Louis Gallois, 63, a civil servant, former ENA man and colleague of Alain Jupp?the former Prime Minister, who has run the SNCF state railways for the past decade. M Gallois was deemed a good fit because he had served in state aerospace in the past. e was replaced at the railways by Anne-Marie Idrac, civil servant and ENA alumna, who was head of the RATP. While the appointment of M Gallois to EADS was generally welcomed, unions and media criticised M de Villepin?s promotions as ?jobs for the boys?. Criticism was focused on the ?parachuting? into the RATP of M Mongin, who has been a friend of the Prime Minister since they studied in the same year at the ENA. It was widely assumed that M de Villepin, who is more unpopular than any Prime Minister since the 1950s, had wanted to secure the future of his friend before the end of the Government?s term next May.

Les Echos, a business daily, lamented ?this very French tradition of musical chairs in which appointments are inspired more by politics than ability?.

There was little criticism from the Socialist opposition. The party largely favours the appointment of state technocrats to senior industrial posts. Fran?s Hollande, its leader, and S?l? Royal, the presidential favourite who is his partner, were both classmates of M de Villepin in the same year at the ENA.

Unions at the RATP, where staff have staged four strikes over the past year, said they expected trouble from a new boss who had made a name for pushing M de Villepin into confrontation with workers while serving in the pivotal job as the Prime Minister's chief-of-staff. Unions at the SNCF, who have staged several strikes over the past two years, were alarmed by the departure of the "conciliatory" M. Gallois, and his replacement by Mme Idrac, who, they suspect favours privatising the state rail monopoly.