Paris – The nephew of the late French president Francois Mitterand is battling to save his ministerial job over a ‘sex with Thai money boys’ scandal.

The fascist National Front party have lead attacks on openly gay 62 year old Culture Minister Frederic Mitterand, accusing him of having sex with under aged boys during a visit to Thailand, despite the fact that Mitterand himself published a best selling book in 2005 in which he described his sexual exploits with money boys in Bangkok.

The attacks came after Mitterand offered verbal support for film maker Roman Polanski, who has been accused of sexually abusing a 13 year old girl in the US.

“I got into the habit of paying for boys … The profusion of young, very attractive and immediately available boys put me in a state of desire that I no longer needed to restrain or hide,” Mitterand wrote in his 2005 autobiography.

La mauvaise vie (The Bad Life), was a critically acclaimed bestseller and Mitterrand, then a popular television presenter, was praised for his honesty.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the extremist National Front party, read extracts on television on Monday and demanded Mitterrand’s resignation.

As outrage intensified on the internet, the Socialist party, the main opposition, said yesterday that it was appalled that the apparent practitioner of paedophile abuse was serving as a Cabinet minister. “I find it shocking that a man can justify sex tourism under the cover of a literary account,” said Benoît Hamon, a senior Socialist.

Mitterrand, who hails from the political Left, hit back yesterday, saying that he was flattered that his name was being sullied by extremists but shocked by the Socialists’ attitude. “If the National Front drags me through the mud, it is an honour. If a left-wing MP drags me through the mud, he should be ashamed,” he said.

He had been prepared for the assault since he was appointed a minister in June by French President Sarkozy, aides said.  Aware of the risks, his advisers had deemed that Mr Mitterrand would be protected by France’s tradition of discretion over the private lives of public figures.

It appeared that they had not taken account of the power of the internet, the greater scrutiny of private life and public emotion over paedophile crimes. France has been active in prosecuting French citizens for sex with under-age prostitutes in Thailand, althougth there is no evidence that Mitterand had any relationship with underaged boys.

Chantal Brunel, an MP and former spokeswoman for President  Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement, said that Mitterrand’s book was sordid, but the row over it was a “a non-event”.

Websites sympathetic to Mitterrand said that he had already explained his Thai exploits after the 2005 book. In one television appearance, he said that homosexuals call all men ‘boys’. “They say boys when you are 60 years old,” he said at the time, denying that the male prostitutes were under age.

Charges that he used “little boys” were “part of the general puritanism which surrounds us nowadays and which always tries to blacken the picture,” he told France3 television in 2005.