The short temper of Nicolas Sarkozy has claimed a new victim as his former favourite Rama Yade, France’s independent-minded sports minister, has been frozen out after criticising the president’s handling of a nepotism scandal.

Yade, the government’s most popular member, has repeatedly exasperated Sarkozy and risks suffering the same fate as Rachida Dati. She was the former justice minister, another so-called “Sarkozette” or woman minister, who lost her job after irritating Sarkozy with her alleged poor performance and difficult personality.

When Sarkozy first appointed Yade as secretary for human rights, he privately raved that she would one day join Condoleezza Rice, the then American secretary of state, as a black woman on the world stage.

A symbol of his rainbow cabinet, breaking with the white elitist past (although she is the daughter of a diplomat and a professor from Senegal), Yade was always at his side on official trips.

Then in December 2007 the president telephoned her at dawn to summon her to the Elysée Palace for a dressing down after she had interrupted a visit to Paris by Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gadaffi by saying that France was not a “doormat” on which he could wipe off the blood of his crimes. Paris should demand guarantees on human rights in Libya, she declared.

She again angered Sarkozy by refusing to stand in elections to the European parliament. “I had to hold the phone at arm’s length, he was shouting so loudly,” she recalled.

Sarkozy has barely spoken to her since the beginning of the year; he saw her on her own only once, three weeks ago, when he urged her to focus on her ministerial job.

The meeting was said to have gone well, but their relations plunged to a new low a week later when Yade broke ranks in a scandal over the president’s insistence that his son Jean, 23, a law student, should head Epad, the organisation that runs La Défense, the business district west of Paris. “We must not give the impression that there is a gap between the protected elites and the little people,” Yade said.

When he heard about her comment, Sarkozy burst out: “This is too much!” The next day, at a meeting of the government’s media strategy group, Claude Guéant, Sarkozy’s chief of staff, spent 10 minutes reprimanding Yade.

Yade could not have touched a more sensitive nerve. The controversy over Jean, with accusations of running a banana republic, has deeply upset Sarkozy. One government heavyweight compared his state of mind with the winter of 2007 when, after divorcing his wife Cécilia, he “psychologically abandoned the Elysée”.

“He’s a highly emotional type, not at all the rational cynic that people sometimes describe him as ... especially when his family is affected. It’s one of his weaknesses,” said a minister. Jean has since given up seeking the top La Défense job, joining the board instead.

Sarkozy hit back at Yade with a vengeance. He demanded that she abandon her seat in the Hauts-de-Seine area west of Paris, his family fiefdom, where Jean is a councillor, to stand as the No 2 on his centre-right UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) list in the northern Val-d’Oise suburb in the regional elections in March.

Yade is making no secret of her reluctance to follow the president’s order. According to the pro-Sarkozy newspaper Le Figaro, last week she was “on the verge of a fit of hysteria” at the prospect of switching constituencies.

Yade protested loudly after a party colleague said that her candidacy in Val-d’Oise would be more in line with “local colour” — a reference to the high immigrant population. Yade complained that running there would be perceived as unacceptable “ethnic parachuting”.

One unnamed government minister even said that “many people” would like to see Yade sacked and replaced by David Douillet, a former Olympic judo champion, in a reshuffle expected after the regional elections.

Dominique Paillé, the party spokesman, called her to order, saying: “When you’re a minister, you have to fight and carry the party’s flag. You mustn’t balk at going into battle, wherever it is.”

Apparently stung by the public reprimand, Yade swiftly sought to placate Sarkozy. “We will see where people think I’m most useful,” she said in a television interview. But she pointedly failed to give in to Sarkozy’s wish.

Privately, she put a brave front on her latest clash with the president, saying: “Don’t worry about me. This is my second job as a minister. I’m 32. The French people don’t look displeased with me. What’s the problem?”

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president