Like other French presidents before him, Emmanuel Macron knows the value of a photogenic dog at the Élysée Palace. His black labrador-griffon cross, Nemo, is the first French presidential pet to come from a rescue centre, and since his arrival this summer he has been photographed in the gardens and even standing to attention on the palace steps to welcome Niger’s president, Mahamadou Issoufou.

But two-year-old Nemo brought a whole new meaning to the term presidential leaks this weekend when he cocked his leg for a long and abundant wee against an ornamental fireplace in Macron’s gilded office during a filmed meeting between the president and junior ministers.

In the footage for the channel TF1, three junior ministers are in Macron’s ornate office talking to the president about inner-city investment when Nemo relieves himself behind them. Macron and the ministers look on helpless until the dog finishes. “I wondered what that noise was,” says the junior minister for ecology, Brune Poirson, who had been talking when the dog began relieving itself.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nemo outside the Élysée Palace. Photograph: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images

“Does that happen often?” asks Julien Denormandie, a junior minister and longterm Macron aide. Macron laughs, stays in his seat and continues with the meeting. “You have sparked a totally unusual behaviour in my dog,” he says.

The film does not show who clears up the mess.

Regularly photographed with their smiling owners for magazine spreads, French presidential dogs aren’t always at ease with the lifestyle at the Élysée Palace. Nicolas Sarkozy’s dogs caused so much damage gnawing the edges of historic furniture that thousands of euros of restoration work was needed after Sarkozy’s departure, according to the investigative website Mediapart.

Jacques Chirac’s miniature white maltese, Sumo, was banished by the former president after becoming so depressed about leaving the presidential palace to move into a flat that he began routinely savaging his master.