Thailand’s Prime Minister was forced to step down last night over his double life as a television celebrity chef. After a long deliberation by the nine judges of the constitutional court in Thailand, Samak Sundaravej was told that he and his 35-strong Cabinet must resign.

The unanimous judgment appears to bring to an end the seven-month rule of the first Prime Minister to be elected democratically since the Thai Government fell to a military coup in 2006. In his short stint as Prime Minister the combative Mr Samak, 73, has shrugged off a variety of legal challenges, street protests and an unstable relationship with the military elite.

“His position as Prime Minister has ended,” Chat Chonlaworn, the head of the nine-judge panel, said.

Residents of Bangkok said that they feared a backlash by supporters of the Prime Minister in the coming days.

It remains unclear how long the Prime Minister’s period out of office will be: members of his party suggested that it could be only a couple of days. His Cabinet was told that it would be allowed to stay on in the interim until a new administration was installed. That could be led by Mr Samak again if he is re-elected by Parliament, as the law seems to allow.

The party supporters of Mr Samak said that they would fight to put him back in charge as soon as possible.

Before he became Prime Minister the weekly television appearances of Mr Samak — cookery-themed political rants and culinary demonstrations at local markets — made him a household name in Thailand. So did his more innovative, self-devised recipes such as pork leg stewed in Coca-Cola.

The court decided that the continued apron-wearing appearances of Mr Samak on the television cookery show Tasting and Grumbling while in office had breached a conflict of interest law that forbids moonlighting.

The court did not accept Mr Samak’s claim in his defence that he had received only derisory payments for his appearances and had been a freelance actor and not an employee of the television station.

Few could have predicted that it would be his love of cooking that ousted Mr Samak — it has been one of his few saving graces for much of his premiership.

His attempt to win back the support of the Army included serving chicken curry to soldiers serving along the Cambodian border, and his response to rising food inflation was to offer poorer Thais a cheap but nourishing recipe for sikrong kai tomfuk — chicken bone soup.

The live televised pronouncement of Mr Samak’s humiliating fate caused near-hysterical celebration among the hundreds of rain-lashed People’s Alliance for Democracy protesters who have locked him out of his prime ministerial offices for the past two weeks. When it later became clear that there was the prospect of an immediate return to power the mob was less impressed and showed little sign of ending its vigil.

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