Christine Lagarde, the French Trade Minister, asked the authorities to let M Bové into the territory after he performed a characteristically showy stunt, going on to France Inter radio live from a detention centre at the Hong Kong airport.

M Bové, who made his name by demolishing a McDonald’s restaurant in southern France in 1999, telephoned the radio station in Paris because he knew that Pascal Lamy, the World Trade Organisation Secretary-General and French technocrat, was the guest of the breakfast phone-in programme.

“Upon my arrival in Hong Kong they seized my passport and took me to a detention centre,” M Bové said.

“I have just been informed of my expulsion on the first flight for Paris, saying that I am persona non grata for the meeting of the WTO. The Hong Kong authorities are preventing any debate that runs contrary to the WTO.”

M Lamy, who was also broadcasting from Hong Kong, told M Bové to avoid taking the return flight because he would try to have him admitted to Hong Kong, where he is accredited as an observer with the Via Campesina, a world peasants’ movement.

Mme Lagarde asked the French consul-general in Hong Kong to make contact with the local authorities while her staff sought a promise from M Bové that he would behave during the summit.

M Bové complied but added: “This doesn’t mean we have to stay quiet.”

With his protest antics and spells in prison, the campaigning sheep farmer has become a star of France’s radical “non- parliamentary” Left.

M Bové even enjoys some public backing as a possible candidate for the 2007 presidential election.

M Bové, 53, who casts himself as a martyr to capitalist oppression, is awaiting an appeal against a three-month prison sentence for destroying fields of experimental genetically modified crops.

As a known troublemaker with a criminal record, he has been barred from visiting summits in the United States and Canada in the past.