Cécilia Sarkozy, the wife of the French President, has surrendered a credit card after her access to the lavish and unaccounted Elysée palace budget threatened to heap embarrassment on the Government.

Mrs Sarkozy, 49, a glamorous figure who displays her independence from her husband, had only spent £275 so far, on two business meals, said Lau-rent Wauquiez, a government spokesman. But, he said, the Elysée budget would now be subjected “to stricter rules of transparency and accounting”.

L’affaire de la carte began when Le Canard Enchaîné, an investigative weekly, reported that Mrs Sarkozy had become the firstpremière dame to be issued with presidential plastic. The expenses of her predecessors were paid by their security officers.

Presidential spending has become a touchy subject since it emerged that President Chirac multiplied the Elysée’s running costs eightfold to €100 million a year (£68 million).

The French President is still not required to report how the money is spent and Mr Sarkozy had not, until yesterday, included the presidential household among his urgent reforms.

The Government was embarrassed when René Dosière, a left-wing MP who has written a book called The Elysée’s Secret Moneyabout the murky financial practices of the Elysée, placed a written question to François Fillon, the Prime Minister. “In what capacity does the wife of the head of state have access to public funds, given that she does not hold a position and is not part of the presidential staff?” Mr Dosière asked.

Mr Fillon said that no one at the Elysée was abusing official credit cards. “This is all very petty and the Elysée will provide a detailed response,” the Prime Minister said in a radio interview.

Emmanuelle Mignon, Mr Sarkozy’s director of staff, said she had suggested the card for Mrs Sarkozy as a “modern way of taking care of standard expenses such as protocol gifts for the wives of heads of state, wreaths and entertainment”.

Mr Dosière is calling for a system under which parliament would vote the presidency an annual budget with a strict separation between public and private expenses.

“If that had been the case, François Mitterrand would never have lodged his second family at the taxpayer’s expense and Jacques Chirac would not have had his holidays financed by the state,” he said.

Mrs Sarkozy, a former part-time model, remains the subject of gossip and speculation because of her long absences from the public eye and her failure to appear on some important occasions.

She did not vote, for example, in the decisive round of the presidential elec-ton in May. She has lately been overseeing renovations to the living quarters of the Elysée, which the Sarkozys found too cramped.

Times Recommends

• Times Charity Appeal: SolarAid
• Is it Black Monday all over again for Dubai?
• Behind the scenes at the biggest deal