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Jacques Chirac was Mayor of Paris, running for President of the Republic when I first spoke to him.

The camera team and I had to stand on a rug in the middle of an enormous salon which seemed to take up the whole first floor of the Mairie, while I shouted questions in French at the candidate who was seated at an imposing desk some 10 metres away.

Nobody does chic grandeur quite like the French. Chirac, who died this week at the age of 86, spoke English well having travelled widely in the United States in his youth, when he nearly married a "Southern Belle".

He was a lifelong fan of cowboy films. But in his public life, as Mayor of Paris for two decades, prime minister and then president from 1995 to 2007, he took the view that he should only speak the native tongue he shared with Voltaire and Racine.

The heads of government of the 28 EU nations are all equal but the French president is more equal than the others.

He - so far they've all been men - is also head of state, on a par with the Queen or US President, and since he is directly elected by name, he enjoys by far the biggest personal mandate of any leader on the continent.

Chirac and his predecessors, Francois Mitterrand and Valery Giscard D'Estaing, were all advocates of greater European integration, but they also relished their special status as national leaders, making a point of arriving at summits last and leaving first, just like a monarch.

Tony Blair had to tussle with the president throughout his decade as prime minister, writing in his memoirs that Chirac "always had one great attribute… he looked like a president, spoke like one and carried himself like one".

Chirac was a tall and elegant figure, with a deep and sonorous voice. Although he bought a chateau in Correze, his ancestral base in the heart of France, he was no aristocrat, unlike his rival Giscard D'Estaing whose political career he helped end.

There was a diplomatic incident when, as prime minister, Chirac used a French obscenity during a heated negotiation with Margaret Thatcher. The official interpreters refused to translate the word.

Chirac loved plunging into crowds at markets and pressing the flesh, and in return he remains one of France's best loved politicians.

Nicknamed "le bulldozer" by former French President Georges Pompidou, he was well-versed in the dark arts of politics, skilled at coming out on top, at the expense of other politicians.

At a summit in Bordeaux with then-British Prime Minister John Major, I watched as Chirac used a news conference to heap public praise on his PM, the cerebral Alain Juppe, seated just in front of him.

As Juppe squirmed under the lavish compliments, everyone present knew they were the black spot. Juppe was sacked days later.

Chirac revived the right of centre nationalist Gaullist party. But for all his paternalistic approach his policies veered wildly from being nationalism to a crypto-socialism, to privatisation and internationalist liberalism.

When he called a snap election to consolidate his power after serious civil disturbances, he lost and had to co-habit in government with the socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin.

He was also in the Elysee when France voted "non" in a referendum on the proposed new EU constitution. Chirac commented that his countrymen had shot themselves in the foot.

Chirac enjoyed the licence which the French seem prepared to grant their political leaders. Although he stayed married for more than 60 years and had two children with his wife Bernadette de Chodron de Courcel, he was well known for affairs.

The security detail which accompanied him to his dalliances even nicknamed him "Monsieur two minutes, including shower".

Nicknamed 'le bulldozer'... [Chirac] was well-versed in the dark arts of politics, skilled at coming out on top, at the expense of other politicians.

After leaving office, Chirac was convicted and given a two-year suspended sentence for embezzlement during his time as Mayor of Paris.

Chirac was a big fan of French bourgeois cuisine, especially tete de veau, and he was overheard joking about Britain with Russian President Vladimir Putin: "How can you trust a country with such terrible food?".

Not surprisingly, Blair relished London's victory over Paris to host the 2012 Olympics. It was compensation for their clash over involvement in the Iraq War, which followed the 9/11 attacks on the US.

In 2002 and 2003, Blair battled furiously for the EU to join and back officially the American-led invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Even though a British ambassador told me "the Frogs always come round in the end", they didn't. France blocked the second UN resolution, which would have given the combatants full legal cover.

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Chirac rallied "old Europe" - France, Germany, Italy etc - against the invasion and was furious when Blair recruited "new Europe" - former communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe - to the cause, commenting that they had "missed a good opportunity to shut up".

Often overlooked in this country was the relevance of Chirac's own military experience. As a young man Chirac was climbing the first rungs of the French political ladder at Sciences Po and ENA, but broke away, against the will of his patrons, to volunteer for active service as an officer in the Algerian war.

That bitter experience coloured his life-long political outlook. He was the first president to face up to France's collaboration in the Holocaust.

Blair had a love-hate relationship with Chirac. On bad days Blair called the president "a demagogue" and Chirac retorted that the prime minister was "badly brought up".

But the former UK prime minister, who was proud of his own facility with the French language, also courted the president.

The Blairs appointed Chirac a sort of unofficial godfather to his young son, Leo, who was born in 2001. They presented Chirac with a photograph of their son, and he took a close interest in the boy.

That didn't stop Le Bulldozer musing in public at an EU Summit: "How will you be able to look Leo in the face in 20 years' time if you are the one who unleashes this war?"

RIP Jacques Chirac, a French statesman to his fingertips.