Carla Bruni-Sarkozy's latest PR coup involved praising her husband's endowment of little grey cells. What further revelations await us?

It's official - the Elysée Palace has a new member of staff: PR Carla. Before, she'd keep smiling broadly and looking admiringly at her brand new husband, whom she makes a point of calling "mon amour" in front of ministers and journalists.

Now, as a publicist with a new product to sell would, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy tells the French that Nicolas has six brains. Well, actually, she's not so sure. She said "five or six brains in an interview with Le Parisien. Six might sound a wee bit too much, while five sound resolutely plausible.

She adds, very conscientiously, that these five or six brains are "extremely well irrigated". We wouldn't want the president to be a freak with one normal and functioning brain and four or five atrophied dead brains stuck in his cortex, would we?

When you Google "six brain man", the results are freakish indeed. Such as this one: "A brain-damaged man who could communicate only with slight eye or thumb movements for six years can speak again, after stimulating electrodes were placed in his brain, researchers report." Or this: "He had a 7cm knife deep in his brain, but this New Zealand man stayed conscious six hours waiting for surgeons to plan an operation to get it out."

But if you add Sarkozy in the list of key words Google suddenly tilts back to life: but of course, you must be talking about the French president, the famous six-brain man! And here you are with an endless list: every single newspaper on the planet seems to have been reporting Carla's words. So the PR strategy works. Carla speaks and newspapers print.

Strangely, very few foreign journalists, reporting her words, took the mickey. Not even the ferocious New York Post, which sounds for once surprisingly tame. It just reminds the reader that Carla's words are a godsend for unpopular Sarkozy.

I guess we should be grateful to Carla for having chosen to talk about his inflated brain system rather than other powerful attributes. Imagine if she had said: "Nicolas has five or six penises, all extremely well irrigated." Mind you, such claim might be part of the next PR offensive, the emergency quote for when his poll rating reaches disaster level.

The question is: how long are we going to take the whole Sarkozy masquerade lightly, how long are we going to split our sides laughing whenever Carla says something ridiculous? We may keep emailing each other links of YouTube's practical jokes such as this one, but how long will it take us to say: this is enough?