During his rise to power, Emmanuel Macron, France’s youngest modern leader, was often seen surrounded by a close-knit group of identikit white male advisers in suits, fellow graduates of elite political schools, soon nicknamed “the Mormons” for their uniformity. But one woman stood out: Senegalese-born Sibeth Ndiaye, his media communications supremo. The straight-talking 39-year-old in a biker jacket played a key role in crafting Macron’s image as the change-making outsider; the man who built a new centrist party in order to fight the far-right Marine Le Pen, with his intriguing personal story as a gifted school pupil who married his drama teacher, Brigitte.

Often, when Ndiaye briefed the Paris media establishment on Macron’s policy ideas, she was the only minority ethnic person in the room. She remembers the exact moment Macron really understood how this felt. It was 2015, he was an ambitious economy minister in government under the Socialist president François Hollande, and she was organising the media scrum following him at an aviation show in a hangar north of Paris. But the police kept blocking her way. “Every time we got to a stand, the security cordon would stop me going through,” she says when we meet in her office. “Usually I’m incredibly strong in those situations. But this time – I don’t know why, maybe I was tired – I just cracked and I sat down and cried.” The local police chief stepped in and personally escorted her through the event.

She says that when Macron realised what had happened, “he shook my hand for a very long while, looking me straight in the eye. And something was forged between us. It’s one thing to have an intellectual awareness of discrimination, it’s another thing to experience it directly. From that moment, whenever I was out on a walkabout with him, he developed this habit of always turning round and checking: ‘Where’s Sibeth?’”

Ndiaye has been at his side ever since, running his media operation at the presidential palace after he won the 2017 election. She is so close to him that she has advised him on his trouser length, occasionally done his makeup and been known to tuck verses of poetry into his briefings. She is seen as one of the few people who can speak frankly to the president. “She’s direct with him and she jokes and teases him, where I wouldn’t have dared,” one former adviser tells me. This month, Macron propelled her from the shadows on to the public stage, appointing her a cabinet minister and government spokesperson.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest At the Elysée palace with President Macron. Photograph: Getty Images

A unique quirk of French politics is that the spokesperson has a junior ministerial role, sitting on the parliament front benches. Ndiaye’s job is to ruthlessly argue the government’s cause and explain its actions on TV – like Donald Trump’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but with more power. She arrives in the role at a particularly testing time. Five months of gilets jaunes anti-government street demonstrations have seen sporadic rioting on the Champs Elysées. Two years into his term, the pro-business Macron, who promised to transform France with a new form of inclusive politics, has instead been accused of arrogance and being “president of the rich”, his approval ratings dropping below 30% this month. In January, Ndiaye’s predecessor as spokesperson, Benjamin Griveaux – now hoping to run for mayor of Paris – had to be bundled out of a ministry side door after protesters on a forklift truck smashed down the massive wooden gates outside his office and rampaged across the cobbled courtyard, damaging cars and breaking windows.

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There’s no sign of any unrest the day I meet Ndiaye in the 18th-century Paris mansion that serves as her ministry. Hours later, news will break of the fire tearing through Notre Dame, causing a turmoil of announcements and meetings, but now we sit in a quiet office with leather sofas, a vast glass chandelier, modern paintings and campaign pictures of Ndiaye with Macron on the mantelpiece. Over a pot of tea, she is warm and informal. We’re far from the relentless election campaign two years ago when I’d see her sprinting along the drab, grey corridors of Macron’s HQ or still working at midnight on the cold train home from a faraway rally (her days would usually end at 3am).

As a press officer she was known to be direct – in a campaign documentary, she is seen berating a magazine writer: “That’s not the work of a journalist, that’s the work of a slob.” Indeed, she feels her new job is to cut through political waffle and listen to voters. “In order to convince people, you need to understand their difficulties, fears, questions, what they want,” she says. “And sometimes you need to use their vocabulary to make yourself better understood.”

Ndiaye grew up in Senegal, moving to France when she was 17. Unlike many ministers in a centrist government supposed to have been pulled from both left and right, her background is in the leftwing student union movement – when she worked for Macron at the economy ministry, she took public transport every day from the suburban town of Saint-Denis, where she lived with her social housing director husband and three children, twin girls now nine years old and a son aged six. (They have since moved to Paris to be nearer her work.)

Since her appointment, she has become one of the most talked-about and photographed members of the French government; Macron would like her to represent a new, more human face of French politics. Her brief – far from easy – is to make the government seem more likable, more in touch. “Proximity, generosity,” the president is said to have advised her.

However, her new public-facing role has unleashed a riot of sexist and racist abuse. One French author tweeted last month that Ndiaye having natural afro hair in government was an affront to France: a “provocation and a total lack of respect”. Trolls compared her patterned dresses to cleaners’ overalls.

The interior minister, Christophe Castaner, slammed “the outpouring of racist hatred”. The leftwing MP Jean-Philippe Nilor warned that France – a republic supposedly built on the foundation that citizens are equal, no matter their class, race or religion – had failed to move on in the six years since the black justice minister Christiane Taubira was likened to a monkey on social media and saw children wave bananas at her at an event.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘France can’t resolve Brexit in Britain’s place. None of us wants a no-deal, but we’re prepared if it happens.’ Photograph: Ed Alcock/The Guardian

“I think it’s revealing of the moment we live in: that fear of the other, that retreat into what we believe our identity to be,” Ndiaye says of the recent abuse. She says she feels both Senegalese, where she grew up, and French, where she has lived for more than 20 years; she took joint French nationality three years ago. “I have never felt rejected or excluded by my adopted country, but I know there are some people – through fear, foolishness or anxiety over what I might represent – who can be racist.” She says it was worse for the family of her husband, who is white. His family come from “a little French town where they are not constantly confronted with this. So it was very shocking for them – more so than for me.”

Ndiaye’s appointment ensures Macron’s promised gender parity in government, although she is one of only two BAME people out of 36 ministers. “When you’re a woman and you’re black, people will always cast doubt on why you’re there,” she said recently in a TV interview.

Ndiaye grew up in Dakar, steeped in the politics of the African independence movement. Her mother, who was of mixed Togolese and German descent, was a senior judge who went on to head Senegal’s constitutional council. Her father, a politician, was born into a poor family outside Dakar, the orphaned son of a Senegalese soldier who died fighting for France in the second world war. Her parents met at university in Paris in the heady days of 1960s street demonstrations and activism, and then returned to Senegal. Democracy was important at home – even Ndiaye’s name was decided in a family vote with the agreement of her three elder sisters.

“I grew up bathed in politics,” she says. “I have an image in my head of my parents sitting in our living room, under a huge cloud of cigarette smoke as they talked and talked and talked: about the future of the African continent, and French politics, too.”

Every Friday lunchtime, they would host an open house with key thinkers and intellectuals, eating traditional Senegalese fish and rice, and putting the world to rights. Ndiaye would come home from school at lunch to be part of it and “hide in a corner” so she could stay the afternoon.

Earlier this month, on the steps of Ndiaye’s ministry, in her first speech in her new role, she thanked her family for helping her break glass ceilings. She has paid tribute to her father who, with four daughters, was a feminist who insisted school “was a tool for emancipation”. “And I was surrounded by powerful, professional women, many with external signs of power – for example, women who had chauffeur-driven cars, which was something then considered to be reserved for men,” she tells me.

When she was 17, her father became desperately ill and was treated in a Paris hospital. He said he wanted her to have the chance to study abroad, like her sisters, so she moved to attend a high school in Paris, boarding in a student residence. Her father died only a few months after she arrived.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Taking over as government spokesperson from Benjamin Griveaux earlier this month. In January, gilets jaunes protesters on a forklift truck smashed the gates outside his office. Photograph: Getty Images

At school she suffered what she calls “the shock of discovering for the first time that I was black”. Before that, she hadn’t realised “the rejection” that could happen over skin colour. “My parents were intellectually black, and we talked a lot,” she says. “I had learned the poems of Aimé Césaire, of Léopold Sédar Senghor, I was steeped in the concept of la négritude. But it was an intellectual concept. I had never felt it bodily. And I felt it bodily in France.”

It was also the first time she was asked if she had grown up in a hut. Shocked, she learned the western image of Africa, “a TV image of children in the dust”. She says: “Africa was that, but it was also other things.”

Studying biology, she became an activist in a leftwing student union. Her political awakening – as with many of her generation on the left – came one night in Paris in April 2002. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the ex-paratrooper leader of the far-right Front National, a party slammed by its opponents as antisemitic, racist and xenophobic, swept into the second-round runoff of the presidential election against the rightwing Jacques Chirac.

Ndiaye had been watching on TV with student union friends. “Our spontaneous reaction was to run down into the street, and it’s the first time I ever shouted slogans at a demonstration. It was ‘F for fascist, N for Nazi, down with the Front National’.”

She joined the Socialist party straight away, but quickly became discouraged by the fact that no mainstream parties were asking “the fundamental questions” about why voters were turning to Le Pen. “That’s what later drew me to Emmanuel Macron’s project, the idea of deeply questioning the way the country had evolved: what was behind that slow 30-year drift, that insidious poison.”

And yet Marine Le Pen, who took over the far-right party from her father, recently renaming it the National Rally, is still there, with a large support base. When she reached the final round presidential runoff against Macron in 2017, barely anyone took to the streets. Now her party is polling only a point or so short of Macron’s for the European elections next month. Ndiaye insists, “My feeling is that we are armed to come to the battle against her.”

Ndiaye sees a link between the anger in the vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002 and the protests today, saying: “The gilets jaunes are telling us they reject a society where they feel that even when you work, you can’t get by, where there’s an injustice of whichever family you’re born into, you’ve got very little chance of moving up. They think things are being decided without them. Those are things that in some way had been underlying Emmanuel Macron’s election and that we have already put our finger on.” She argues that Macron’s recent listening exercise – a three-month “national great debate” in town halls across the country – will lead to structural change.

Then there’s the upheaval within the EU – Ndiaye got her new job just after Theresa May negotiated the latest Brexit extension at Brussels. Macron was being portrayed in the UK as a stubborn would-be General Charles de Gaulle, isolated among European leaders in refusing the UK a longer time frame for sorting out its political mess.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I tried to get the president’s attention with poetry. I would slot verses into our communications.’ Photograph: Ed Alcock/The Guardian

Like all French ministers, Ndiaye insists the ball is in the UK’s court. “For me, it’s very important that the Brexit vote is respected, even if I don’t share the opinion expressed in the outcome,” she says. “From a French point of view, we can’t resolve British problems in Britain’s place. So it’s now up to the British to find the means to validate the withdrawal agreement which was negotiated at length between the UK and the EU.” She says May’s talks with Labour were seen in Paris as a step towards an orderly Brexit. “None of us wants a no-deal, but we are prepared for one if it happens.”

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Despite the differences in their background – she a former leftwing activist, he a former investment banker – Ndiaye and Macron’s relationship has been described by observers as “relaxed” and close. He once said a head of state should read literature or philosophy every night, lest they lose touch with reality. Ndiaye, when she worked on his economy ministry press team, used their mutual interest in poetry to try to keep him in line. “Running his diary is one of the worst things in the world because he’s someone who likes changing plans at the last minute,” she says. “To sweeten the pill and to get him to sign off on plans, I tried to get his attention with poetry. At the start, I would slot verses of poems into our communications. Then it became a challenge, we did it by periods or cycles: the Romantics, African poetry, Rabelaisian poetry.”

At that time, she and Macron would talk politics “and we didn’t always agree”, though, being typically protective of him, she won’t say on what. At the Elysée – which is often said to create republican monarchs surrounded by a fawning court – she continued to speak her mind to him. “When you advise a politician, it’s important to tell the truth, that’s what you’re paid to do,” she says. “There are enough flatterers in the court, he doesn’t need another one.”

As Macron’s gatekeeper, Ndiaye’s relationship with the media has sometimes been fraught. After becoming president, Macron sought to limit journalists’ access to the back rooms and corridors of power. He wouldn’t give off-the-record chats. He and Ndiaye were accused of seeing journalism mainly as a means to pass on government announcements. In her first question-and-answer session with the press, she denied a report in a magazine that she once said she was fine with “lying to protect the president”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Macron’s inner circle of advisers, nicknamed ‘The Mormons’ for their uniformity, in 2017. Photograph: Getty Images

When, last year, it was suggested that the press office inside the Elysée palace would be moved to another building nearby, news agencies protested, likening Macron to Trump, who had briefly considered moving accredited press out of the White House the year before. Today, Ndiaye defends Macron, saying he “has enormous respect for the media, and I share that, because he’s convinced that democracy can’t exist without counter-powers.” She says the new executive simply wanted some elements of political decision-making to take place calmly, away from constant leaks.

“Journalists naturally do their job, they try to open the black box,” she says. “And my role was in some way to make sure they didn’t open that box. Yes, our way of doing things was different, but at no point was it about showing contempt for the work of journalists or denying them a major place in the balance of democracy. On the contrary.”

Whether Ndiaye – who is so closely personally associated with Macron and was so adept in a spin doctor role – can now convince disillusioned, leftwing or less well-off French voters that the government is genuinely on their side remains to be seen. Her appointment sets the government firmly apart from the far-right populism of Le Pen. But is that enough to win over voters losing confidence in the political class?

Ndiaye says only one factor has driven her life since her childhood in Senegal: “Injustice. I could never bear it. I have always asked myself, why me and not others?” she says. “Why did I live in a privileged way, go to school, was well-dressed, have things that others didn’t just because they weren’t born into the right family?” That rage has never left her, she says.

For now, at the ministry, Ndiaye must rush to her next government meeting. And just like the women in power she grew up admiring, her chauffeur-driven car awaits.

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