The enfants terribles who have France all a Twitter You have to feel sorry for those two hapless budding Twitter stars, Léonard (son of Valérie) Trierweiler, 17, an apprentice cook in Paris, and Louis (son of Nicolas) Sarkozy, 17, currently boarding at an American military school. For over half a century, stringent privacy laws and a craven press protected French politicians, and their offspring, as nowhere else this side of the Axis of Evil. Affairs, second and third families, hidden adulterine children: we were not told, we were not (everyone insisted) interested. A vague sense of decency did the rest: no one would have thought of entrapping a politician's son, Will Straw-style. "Leave the kids alone" worked here even after shocks like Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest in New York, Nicolas Sarkozy's divorce, or François Hollande's serial hook-ups, shack-ups and break-ups prompted thousands of gossip pieces. Alas, in these days of Twitter, you can stitch yourself up in public without our help. Little Léonard's mother, Valérie, had managed to despatch, unintentionally, her partner of nine years, François Hollande, with a single political tweet against Ségolène Royal. Now Master Trierweiler, with some 9,000 followers, is co-starring in a very public slanging match with Louis Sarkozy, son of the ex-president and his ex-second wife, Cécilia (17,000+ followers). The level of their political invective has struggled to rise above that of Christmas panto. Each boy had the perfectly worthy intention of supporting his respective parents. When Valérie had a breakdown after François Hollande's affair with the actress Julie Gayet was revealed, her son, @trierweiler3, took to Twitter to express his distress that she was sedated and he had been refused access to her hospital room by security agents. @Sarko_Junior, who'd mostly tweeted about his school, sports and Star Wars, took up e-cudgels when his father hit back at the many judicial inquiries against him. One of the tweeters who called for Nicolas Sarkozy to be jailed was @trierweiler3. Within minutes, Twitter was doing what it loved most: fanning the flames of a disagreement. Hundreds of disobliging comments were directed at one or both of the boys - who lacked the experience and wisdom not to respond. Every rumour, accusation or negative report became a cue for a scuffle. Louis likes to retweet reports from the Right-wing newsweekly Valeurs Actuelles, whose attitude to fact-checking is casual: it alleged that Léonard had been twice arrested for possession of class B drugs (unverified) and was still living at the Elysée at taxpayers" expense 10 months after his mother left (false). In his wittiest tweet - which is not saying much - Léonard shot back that he indeed lived at the Elysée still, where he met Mazarine Pingeot (Mitterrand's secret daughter, now 40) every evening. His tweeting is more consistently political. He suggested young Louis should account for "his father's €600 billion debt" (the national deficit under Sarkozy). But that's the best of a limp bunch. Who writes your tweets? Your French spelling is rubbish and you're arrogant," tweeted @trierweiler3. "At least it's not your mother, we know her writing experience is dismal," @Sarko_junior shot back. So, you've been taught neither French nor to respect mums? And you to respect dads? The French, though, are really enjoying this rather sad scrap. The mistakes of the parents are being visited on their children, who are scrapping in the public arena as the crowd bays for blood. It is a sudden and bewildering change from the years during which the mere whisper of a politician's child's name was actionable. While this, on the whole, is probably preferable, right now the boy's parents really do need to turn their kids" Twitter accounts off.