The pop star populist: Emmanuel Macron is on a mission to shed his banker image

What an enviable career choice it is to become a popular president in an age when most politicians are grumpily tolerated rather than admired. Yet the Elysée this week saw Emmanuel Macron glad-handing Rihanna, after waving goodbye to Bono and Bill Gates.

Tony Blair got stuck with visitations from Blur and Oasis, and Bill Clinton’s perpetual anthem was Born in the USA, with Bruce Springsteen invariably the opening strum at his rallies, but the French leader has set a new bar for mixing pop and politics, from the moment he had a Daft Punk medley played by a brass band at his inauguration.

The man who says he is proud to be a “global citizen” — at a time when many are putting up barriers and glowering at the outside world — is styling Macronism as a creed to which the globally glitzy can attach themselves — whatever it comes to mean.

That meant getting behind Team Rihanna’s cleverly managed Twitter challenge to commit to funding education projects in the developing world — and basking in the starlight. Those who suspect that a great deal of the pop icon’s appeal for the new French President might lie in her whopping 75 million Twitter followers (he already has a decent but improvable 1.7 million) might just be onto something. But Macron is also keenly aware that he leads a racially divided France. The next set of images the French media disseminated of him after his Rihanna encounter was of the President attending cheery naturalisation ceremonies for recent immigrants granted citizenship.

The duo behind the Macron makeover, from the days when he looked like a stiff French banker in a posh suit, are two characters who could come straight out of the high-octane world of Spin (the addictive, pot-boiling French political TV drama.) Sibeth Ndiaye is a French-Senegalese image adviser — seen bouncing excitedly alongside her boss in moments of high emotion after his election win. In generation and style, it’s a long way from the style of the Hollande and Sarkozy years; Ndiaye is a youthful 37 in earnest student specs and her working wardrobe is more adidas than Armani . Her look is “long [hair] braids and tracksuits”, according to Le Monde. And her tendency to “execute forcefully to the letter what has been decreed on high mean she has the rather fearful respect of liberal French journalists seeking favours”. (Off the record from a senior one of their number: “Don’t be deceived by her informality. She’s the control freak’s control freak.”)

Ndiaye works closely with Sylvain Fort, nicknamed the “President’s pen”, who writes his keynote speeches and refines his boss’s arguments. Quietly important in the Elysée court, too, is Soazig de la Moissonnière, a young photographer whose carefully composed images of Macron have effectively styled him as a new JFK.

With a background in artistic, rather than news, photography, she has brought a more artful lens to creating political imagery. One photograph shows Macron broodily taking a phone call under a large photograph of Audrey Hepburn (as you do). A now famous shot of his victory speech at the Louvre included the museum’s vast Pharoanic sculpture. But the recent shots of celebrity visitors suggest that Macron wants to take on the mantle of the Clintons in their prime, drawing the world-famous to be seen alongside them.

The Rihanna moment profited both sides, in allowing a star who now has the global following to break out of her signature seductive roles to leave the crop tops and suspenders at home in favour of a mannish Balenciaga jacket and wide-cut Dior trousers. Brigitte Macron, possibly thinking it unwise to try and outdo Rihanna, stuck with a plain white Louis Vuitton jacket and her trademark skinny jeans, nonchalantly rumpled at the knees. Even that simple choice was made to look striking in social media and magazine shots. For high-profile events, Mrs Macron takes advice from Delphine Arnault, of the powerful LVMH dynasty.

The crafty use of adored pop stars to burnish a liberal political image is being compared to the brief, sunny Cool Britannia of Tony Blair. Indeed, the cover of this week’s Spectator magazine riffs on the imagery of this time: it recreates the famous image of Patsy Kensit and Liam Gallagher lying across a bed with a Union Jack bedspread, on the March 1997 Vanity Fair cover. In this stylised version, Macron and his wife lie on the Tricolore. But then Blair was never particularly savvy or interested in the power of digital media in politics when it was in its early stages. In essence, he was a product of the TV era, while Macron is at home in the era of social media — and mining its potential.

In that regard he is closer to Sadiq Khan, who deploys social media relentlessly and is at much at home on Twitter and Facebook as giving a speech on autocue. The power of social media for politicians is that they can pump out a message but have it magnified by association with widely appealing images. I bumped into Khan at a summer party given by the architect Amanda Levete and her husband Ben Evans, who runs the London Design Festival. There was the Mayor, eating miniature fish and chips with Grayson Perry, Jemima Khan, Jimmy Wales and installation artists Langlands & Bell. While Boris Johnson focused his appeal to the commanding heights of the London economy and the City wealth-creators, Khan has found a flattering niche — and a point of comparison with his predecessor — by spending more time rubbing shoulders with the creative classes..

For Macron the stakes are higher, and there are serious risks. For one thing, it is hard to ignore a core of vanity in his obsession with image. It is also rather hard to know where to stop. A growing number of critics are either doling out mockery of his dressing-up tendency — most sharply after he donned a flying suit to visit the air force, which came over as a bit George W Bush in Iraq — or warning that it risks looking like the autocratic preening of Vladimir Putin.

Others close to the Macron court whisper that much of the effort is about sustaining a joint image of youthful vigour with his wife Brigitte, who has put herself firmly at the heart of the Elysée’s less stuffy public image. Not since Carla Bruni, the model wife of Nicolas Sarkozy, whispers a leading French magazine editor, “has a presidential spouse wanted to be in quite so many pictures and roles”.

In fairness, Macron has always been open about how seriously he takes his wife’s advice. She was his drama teacher and has joked that her main job is to stop him rattling on in speeches. Unkinder souls wonder if he missed the fun and frippery of growing up slowly when he fell headlong into a relationship with Brigitte at school. He has also worked relentlessly at his banking career and carving his way into a new French politics. A period of levity and enjoyment of the job is understandable.

But the Macron image will need careful handling as he heads into his first real political challenge. Already he faces a dive in his popularity as he announces the first round of belt-tightening, and turbulence from the Left, where his arch foe Jean-Luc Mélenchon is organising mass protests against spending cuts. On the other flank, disgruntled supporters of Marine Le Pen, when France returns from its long summer break, are railing about his focus on immigrants and asylum-seekers.

More tellingly, few people know what Macronism is about, beyond liberal sentiment and a dislike of Brexit — and it is far from certain France will warm to the reform recipe the newcomer is likely to offer. For now, it’s the summer of fun and photo opps — a President with touches of an older Sun King.