Dati (top), Sarkozy

Paris, March 29: Rachida Dati, France’s glamorous justice minister, is refusing to go quietly after being shunted out of the government by President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The 43-year-old single mother, who had been Sarkozy’s protegee till she fell out of favour, is enjoying an unprecedented wave of popularity and exposure as she works out her notice.

Despite Sarkozy’s wish that she keep a lower profile and avoid being photographed in expensive designer clothes in celebrity magazines, her media star has never been brighter.

At the same time the controversial justice reforms she is pushing through — reforms that were a plank of the President’s election pledge — have ensured she is making headlines in the serious press.

Last week, shortly after it was announced she had been voted the most “symbolic woman” of the beginning of the 21st century in a French poll, it was revealed that Dati had agreed to take part in a TV programme entitled Vie Privée, Vie Publique (Private Life, Public Life) in which she is shown with her baby daughter and family.

A few days later France’s celebrated waxworks museum the Musée Grevin — the Paris equivalent of Madame Tussauds — announced it was creating a model of Dati to be unveiled in September.

She was also photographed in her official tricolour sash after presiding over the wedding of Jean d’Orléans, Duke of Vendome and pretender to the throne of France .

Dati, who is fiercely protective of her private life, also surprised critics and colleagues by agreeing to appear on the front cover of the current edition of the celebrity magazine VSD.

She is pictured in an informal scene with her family. Inside in an interview, Dati’s father, Mbarek Dati, 74, revealed that the birth in January of her daughter Zohra, whose father Dati refuses to name, had changed her.

“Before there was work and nothing else. Now she has something else. She is happier than before,” he said.

He added that he hoped his daughter would leave politics and work in the private sector.

“I would like her to find a company and become the managing director.

“She’s at the top.”

In what some saw as a deliberate attempt to draw attention away from Dati, Elysée Palace, the official residence of the French President, took several days to deny a rumour that a government post was to be offered to television presenter Christine Kelly.

Kelly, 39, was widely reported to be in the running for a ministerial position to replace Dati as the new face of Sarkozy’s multi-cultured administration.

But the news for Dati has not been all positive. It was revealed that she was on a list of candidates for the European elections in 1995 for the rival Socialist Party.

And it was announced that her brother Jamal, 37, a convicted heroin trafficker, had signed a book deal for the story of their childhood in spite of family efforts to prevent him.

Francois Martin, of the newspaper Le Midi Libre, added: “Rachida Dati is a fine example of the Elysée’s approach. Presidential golden girl, high flyer, then thrown out on her ear.

“Rachida Dati remains a symbolic figure. A free woman. An authoritarian minister. Glamorous and sexy, today she is crying for her lost glory.”