The French Interior Minister faced calls for his resignation last night after he was caught on camera making apparently racist remarks directed at Arabs.

As outrage greeted the video clip on the internet Brice Hortefeux claimed that critics had misinterpreted his quip: “When there’s one that’s all right. It’s when there a lot of them that there are problems.”

He insisted that he had not been talking about Arabs, as many had assumed, but about Auvergnats — people from the Auvergne region of central France.

His defence however failed to calm a storm which was threatening to inflict political damage on President Sarkozy, his mentor and friend who had pledged to heal racial divisions in France. “The question is not whether he should resign or not, but what he is still doing in the government,” Benoit Hamon, a spokesman for the opposition Socialist Party, said.

The incident happened at a summer congress of the ruling centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) in Seignosse, southwest France, last weekend. Mr Hortefeux is seen in the video posing for a photograph alongside Amine Benalia-Brouch, a member of UMP whose father is Algerian and mother Portuguese.

An unidentified woman says, apparently in reference to Mr Benalia-Brouch’s Muslim background: “He eats pork and he drinks beer.”

Mr Hortefeux, 51, cuts in amid laughter as a group of party activists look on: “He doesn’t fit the prototype at all. Not at all. We always need one. When there’s one, that’s all right. It’s when there a lot of them that there are problems.”

The comment went unnoticed until the video was sent to Le Monde, the French daily newspaper, which posted it on its website last night.

The row comes amid lingering tension in the French suburbs which erupted into rioting in 2005, with clashes between police and youths from ethnic minorities. With the Interior Minister directly responsible for the police force, the quip is certain to be taken in the suburbs, known as les banlieus, as further evidence of prejudice towards immigrant communities.

Anti-racist groups warned that violence on suburban council estates, many of which are mostly no-go areas for the police, was likely.

The controversy is a setback for Mr Sarkozy who has been trying to overcome hostility in the suburbs, casting himself as an example of tolerance. His Cabinet includes prominent figures from ethnic minorities.

Mr Hortefeux, who has been in his job for only three months, tried to ride out the storm. He denounced a “vain and ridiculous attempt to create a controversy” and ordered his ministry to send out a statement saying: “Not a single word by Brice Hortefeux made reference to a supposed ethnic origin of a young activist.”

The minister won support from Mr Benalia-Brouch, 22, who said: “I am Arab but he completely respected me, it wasn’t at all out of place. And I do not consider that it was a blunder.”

Two days ago Mr Hortefeux forced a senior civil servant accused of making racist remarks to take early retirement. “I will never tolerate racist or discriminatory speech in our country, especially by a state official of any kind. This behaviour violates the values of our republic,” he said.

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