“For a cobbler's son, he's pretty well-heeled,” is how one newspaper summed up the angry reaction to French finance minister Hervé Gaymard's ill-judged attempt to defend himself in the scandal over his extravagant state-funded apartment, which on Friday forced him toresign.

Mr Gaymard, whose family still runs his father's shoe shop in the Savoie, was quoted as telling a magazine this week: “Obviously if I was not a cobbler's son, if I was a grand bourgeois, I would not have had accommodation problems. I would own my own apartment and there would not be all this fuss.”