Devastating ambition defining trait of Le Pen's former chief lieutenant

In the run-up to this weekend's breakaway National Front (FN) congress, the leader of western Europe's formerly most powerful extreme right-wing party concentrated on Bruno Megret's size.

The man who has torn apart the party he founded is a "psychopath" with "little fists, little feet", Mr Le Pen said. "There's nothing wrong with being small, but you shouldn't act big!" Mr Megret, an admirer of Napoleon, ought to "join those in certain establishments who walk around with their hand stuck in their breast pocket, pretending to be Napoleon".

Mr Megret was elected the president of the new FN with 86.2 per cent of the vote at the Marignane Congress, composed of 2,300 delegates from FN federations across France. Physically, Mr Megret is dwarfed by Mr Le Pen, known in the party as Le Menhir after the giant prehistoric stones. Surrounded by the members of his new central committee, Mr Megret (49) was the shortest man on the stage, and his nasal voice had an unfortunate way of skipping into higher octaves when he got excited.

Yet a powerful, devastating ambition - in direct disproportion to his physical stature - runs like a current through Mr Megret.

"I believe in our success, I believe in myself," he told the congress. "We have resolved the crisis of the National Front in two months. We will be able to resolve the problems of France in seven years!" The constant chant of "Me-gret pre-sident" seems to have gone to his head - seven years is the length of the French president's mandate, and Mr Megret already sees himself in the Elysee Palace.

"We loved Le Pen with our hearts," a middle-aged delegate told me. "But we chose Megret with our heads."

For the past 14 years, Mr Megret has been the chief ideologue and organiser of the FN. Mr Le Pen distrusted Mr Megret even when he joined in 1985 - it took four months to negotiate their doomed union. As often happens, the qualities which Mr Le Pen now mocks were at the time Mr Megret's greatest attraction: his upper middle-class background and diplomas from prestigious institutions, including the Ecole Polytechnique, the Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussees and a Master of Science from the University of California.

Mr Megret was elected to the French parliament in 1986. As manager of Mr Le Pen's 1988 presidential campaign - in which the extreme right-wing leader received 15 per cent of the vote - Mr Megret ensured his own place as heir apparent to "le Chef". He has been a member of the European Parliament since 1989.

From his pre-FN membership of the extreme right-wing intellectual Club de l'Horloge and GRECE (Group for Research and Studies for European Civilisation), Mr Megret brought two obsessions to the FN: the superiority of western (especially French) civilisation, and fear of what he calls "the immigration invasion". Mr Megret devised the FN's plan to expel three million immigrants from France. Ironically, his mother is Greek and his wife, Catherine, is half Russian Jewish.