PARIS During President Jacques Chirac's tricky ascent to the peak of French political life his daughter Claude Chirac was behind him every step of the way, her cell phone clutched to her ear, directing his campaigns and polishing his image.

Last week, the 38-year-old single mother was on her own, being questioned by the magistrates whose corruption investigation could fatally damage her father's bid for reelection, AFP reported.

Claude was to have been a backroom fixer overseeing Chirac senior's campaign, but she has now been forced into limelight to respond to allegations that her father profited from kickbacks to fund luxury family holidays.

The younger of Chirac's two daughters, Claude has been his closest adviser since the early 1990s and is reputed to have been the driving force behind his bid for the presidency.

"Claude Chirac is not just a public relations adviser to the president, she has widened her area of responsibility," write journalists Claude Angeli and Stephanie Mesnier in their 1998 book on the double act.

"Fired by affection, devoted, and convinced that only her hero's destiny counts, she wanted to deal with policy, and Chirac did not discourage her," they add.

So close are the pair that Bernadette Chirac is reported to be a little excluded by the bond between her husband and daughter.

Claude is even credited with persuading her father to turn away from his Catholic wife's conservative ideals and seek to appeal to the more liberal ideas of modern France.

When Bernadette expressed her reservations over the introduction of the "pacs", Claude, who is not married to the father of her five-year-old daughter, persuaded Chirac to stay out of the row.

The daughter backed up Chirac the candidate when he chose to address the problems of social exclusion and unemployment, the traditional vote-hunting grounds of the left, despite the reservations of party bosses.

And when Chirac intimate Nicolas Sarkozy dropped out of his inner circle, Claude became the key player in his Monday morning kitchen cabinet and his constant companion.

But now the most memorable image of the pair during their successful campaigning, Chirac receiving intense last minute briefings from his daughter before each interview or public speech, has been replaced with another.

Since magistrates revealed that the Chirac clan's travel was paid for with briefcases stuffed with 500 franc notes, the newspapers have been full of old photographs of the family stretched out on tropical beaches.

It will take all of Claude's skills as a media manipulator to shake off that image in the ten months remaining before next year's election.