The photo is from German newspaper Die Welt.

There’s so much going on in PARIS political circles, I don’t know where to begin.

I think I’ll leave Mesdames Royal and Aubry to sort out who’s boss of the Socialist Party this week before I write about them, leaving me to concentrate on Madame le Ministre Dati.

Rachida Dati is Sarkozy’s Justice Minister and the first Muslim woman to hold a high government post. Since coming to office, she has pushed through many of Sarkozy’s law and order reforms, and is now facing opposition from the magistrates’ union on a number of issues, including overcrowded prisons with high suicide rates.

Now, at 42, Dati is to give birth to her first child in January, but has so far refused to name the father, saying her personal life is ‘complicated’, a descriptor that seems to have been lifted straight from Facebook. Dati has for some time, however, been wearing a large, expensive looking ring, on the fourth finger of her left hand. Until last week, anyway, when the so-called sympathetic-to-Sarkozy newspaper Le Figaro published an interview with Dati about her plans to reform criminal law.

This topic has been overshadowed, though, by the interest in her ring, or rather the disappearance of it. The photograph accompanying the interview was one that had originally appeared in Le Figaro in June, at that time complete with the ring, but this time with the ring photoshopped out. The motivations for this piece of journalistic creativity remain obscure. Was it a desire to de-bling a member of Sarkozy’s government, to detract attention from the fourth finger of her left hand, or something else? Whatever it was, it had the opposite effect.

No doubt everyone will be watching to see just who visits her next January. Mind you, she says she’ll only be taking a week’s maternity leave.

(Readers of German can also read the article in Die Welt from which the photo was taken.)