Star news presenters on French TV have been forced to stand aside during the presidential campaign because of their relationships with President Chirac’s ministers.

The French have rarely been informed of the multitude of dalliances between women journalists and politicians. But in a sign of changing times, the old tradition has stung the country’s two state-run stations.

Beatrice Schonberg, 53, of France 2, who married Jean-Louis Borloo, 55, the Social Cohesion Minister, last year, has agreed to take a back seat during the campaign in order to avoid suspicion of partiality.

More controversially, bitterness surrounded the outing this week of the second journalist, Marie Drucker, 32, a rising star who presents the late evening news programme on France 3.

Ms Drucker said that she would step aside after a celebrity magazine published pictures of her embracing François Baroin, 41, the divorced Minister for Overseas Territories. The pair fell for one another when Ms Drucker interviewed Mr Baroin, a former journalist whose wife was also a journalist, earlier this year, according to Bon Weekend magazine.

Both say that their liaison should never have been reported and they aim to sue publications that linked them under France’s strict privacy law.

“I am sharing the life of a public figure. A publication took it upon itself to expose my private life,” said Ms Drucker. “I will take legal action and will demand damages.”

The news set a dilemma for the French media. Some outlets, including Le Monde, published Mr Baroin’s name while others played up Ms Drucker’s departure while failing to name her “public figure”. France- Inter, the state radio, confused listeners yesterday by reporting the event but giving only a clue to the identity of the man. “Which minister bears a passing likeness to Harry Potter?” asked the newsreader. With his boyish looks and round glasses, Mr Baroin is often compared with the boy wizard.

The two newscasters have insisted that their private lives would never influence their work as journalists and they have been backed by France Televisions, the parent of the two networks.

In the 1990s two women television stars retired from current affairs after becoming partners of Socialist ministers. The cases of Anne Sinclair and Christine Okrent — now married to Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Bernard Kouchner — were, however, exceptions. Women journalists have been closely involved with some of the country’s presidents and senior politicians for decades untroubled by any debate over ethics. Presidents Mitterrand and Chirac have enjoyed close friendships with journalists. Alain Juppé, Prime Minister under Mr Chirac in the late 1990s, married a newspaper journalist. Five years ago judges investigated Mr Chirac’s use of cash to pay for exotic holidays which he took with Elisabeth Friederich, a correspondent for Agence France-Presse when he was Gaullist leader and Mayor of Paris in the early 1990s. They found that Mr Chirac had paid £17,000 in air tickets for his companion, according to Sexus Politicus, by Christophe Deloire and Christophe Dubois, a best selling book this year on the dalliances of French politicians.

A year ago Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister and centre-right candidate for the presidency, began a relationship with Anne Fulda, a correspondent of le Figaro, after his wife Cécilia left him for an advertising executive. Ms Fulda moved to other duties at le Figaro but the French media barely mentioned her name in connection with Mr Sarkozy. Mrs Sarkozy returned to her husband earlier this year.

A woman journalist was also reported in books this year to have come between Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate for the Presidency, and François Hollande, her partner who is also the party leader.

Ms Royal delivered a fierce warning to the unnamed political reporter from Paris Match magazine after she discovered that the journalist was paying excessive attention to her partner.