Arab Spring led to the fall of the first wives' club

As they sat demurely with their husbands at a butterfly-print tablecloth dominated by a pastel flower arrangement, a photographer was ushered in to grab a picture for French celebrity magazines. After all, this was a communion of fashion's high priestesses: a former Italian supermodel turned folk-singer entertaining a Chanel-loving, London-raised, former banker and conveniently Westernised Middle Eastern first lady.

French Elle had recently voted Asma "the most stylish woman in world politics", Paris Match called her "an eastern Diana", a "ray of light in a country full of shadow zones".

Only days after the lunch, a desperate Tunisian vegetable seller would set himself alight, sparking the first revolution of the Arab Spring.

Even as the Sarkozys' butlers served the Assads freshly squeezed juice in crystal glasses from silver platters, there was unease among some diplomats about the French president schmoozing the ruler of an oppressive dictatorship known for torture, brutality and political prisoners.

But Nicolas Sarkozy, an expert on the importance of photogenic wives in politics, saw Asma as his insurance policy. "When we explained that this was the worst kind of tyrant, Sarkozy would say: 'Bashar protects Christians and, with a wife as modern as his, he can't be completely bad'," the former French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner later confided to journalists.

Now, after 11 months of bloody repression of the pro-democracy uprising in Syria, with thousands dead and tens of thousands of refugees spilled over Syria's borders, Asma's careful public-relations strategy as the gentle British-born face of the regime has crumbled. When she appeared smiling and immaculately dressed on February 26 alongside her husband to vote in a referendum on a new Constitution, it only deepened opposition accusations that she has become a modern-day Marie Antoinette.

The row over a shockingly fawning, lengthy puff piece in Vogue last year describing Asma's Louboutin shoes and charity work, as well as a recent appearance at a rally hugging her children in support of her husband and an email to the London Times explaining her backing of him, has reopened the debate about the role of dictators' wives in the Arab Spring.