Has the Chancellor gambled it all and lost?

The coup against Blair has forced the PM to start packing his bags, but Brown may be the biggest loser in Labour's infighting. By Francis Elliott

'They haven't been reading their Machiavelli," said the minister with a sly smile. "The first rule in coups? Bring back the body."

By today Tony Blair should have been starting his first full day out of office, driven from No 10 by a delegation of senior ministers. Instead he feels safe enough to spend the weekend in the Middle East while it is his rival, Gordon Brown, whose character is under scrutiny.

Both men yesterday ordered their supporters to observe a ceasefire after a week of extraordinary bloodletting. As casualties are removed from the field, it seems Mr Brown has the worse body count.

Mr Blair may have been forced to make public what has long been a private agreement - that he would go in 2007 - but he has not surrendered control of his departure.

On the other hand, Mr Brown is accused of orchestrating a failed coup, grinning triumphantly when he thought it had succeeded, and of being unfit to become Prime Minister.

So has the Chancellor over-extended himself and left the field open for a new challenger such as Alan Johnson to emerge, as ultra-Blairites hope?

No 10 has privately accused the Chancellor of being behind Wednesday's letter signed by 17 MPs elected in 2001 calling on the PM to quit. According to reports yesterday the letter was supposed to trigger three other such missives over the following few days, culminating in a final, devastating ministerial delegation yesterday.

As this newspaper reports today, a second letter was certainly prepared by members of the 2005 intake.

Helen Goodman, Labour's new MP for Bishop Auckland, received an email from "citizenpaine" at 2.17pm on Monday. "Thanks for deleting earlier email," it reads. "Very frustrated at lack of phone connection. Perhaps we can converse in code through parliamentary email system."

The anonymous plotter then asks who Ms Goodman would "feel able to call".

"A two-tier approach is the one I would suggest. Dead certs - call first and leave to later the possibles who may be persuaded by the level of support from colleagues."

There then follows the text of a letter to Mr Blair, telling him "with regret" that Labour's renewal "must start without delay ... and cannot start whilst you are in office".

"The belief there should be an urgent change of leader and Prime Minister is shared widely among colleagues in the Parliamentary Party and members of the Labour Party," it concludes.

Ms Goodman does not deny her participation but says simply: "No letter was sent by the 2005 intake to Downing Street."

Another plotter says more than 10 new MPs had signed the letter and were ready to put it in on Friday. Following Mr Blair's announcement on Thursday, they pulled back from the brink.

But chillingly for No 10, the MP made it clear that the option of sending a public demand for the PM's removal remained under active discussion. "If we aren't happy at the way the hand-over is going we will send it in."

And one of the 2001 signatories hinted at a level of co-ordination when he said: "We've walked into the building and pressed the button. It's up to others now."

The claim that Mr Brown commands waves of disciplined insurgents waiting to throw themselves on the No 10 machine-gun nests is undermined somewhat by in-fighting among the various anti-Blair factions, however. The chief organiser of a separate group waiting to make public its dissatisfaction with Mr Blair called the 2001 and 2005 operations "half-baked, candy-arsed, freelance disasters".

Words of a similar stamp are flying around No 10 at the efforts of Charles Clarke to frame the leadership debate in a way the former home secretary presumably thought helpful.

Having seen Anne McElvoy of the Evening Standard on Thursday, Mr Clarke enjoyed pre-dinner drinks with Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson of The Daily Telegraph. The contents of their tape-recorders have plunged Labour to new lows.

The Chancellor, said Mr Clarke, had behaved in an "absolutely stupid" manner and had to prove his fitness for the highest office. By the evening, Mr Clarke had warmed to his theme. The Chancellor has "psychological" issues, is a "control freak" and "totally uncollegiate", reported Sylvester and Thomson, noting that he was "sitting in his Norwich constituency with a glass of red wine in his hand".

Asked by colleagues on Friday what he had told the Telegraph, Mr Clarke is said to have replied: "I genuinely can't remember."

The intemperance of his language may have taken some of the sting out of his attack on Mr Brown, but the leadership front-runner knows that his character is now a key issue.

When he appears on today's Sunday AM on BBC1, the Chancellor is planning to address directly those who question his fitness for office. He will say that he would welcome a challenge to his leadership bid, even saying he would encourage potential rivals to step forward. In a further conciliatory gesture, he will hint he would bring back Mr Clarke into his cabinet. He says the perception of him as a control freak had built up through years of turning down colleagues' requests for cash as Chancellor.

A central condition of this weekend's fragile truce is that there should be no further attacks from Blair supporters on either his personality or his policies. Although the Prime Minister has agreed to rein in his attack dogs, he is resisting a further demand that he say publicly that there are no other credible challengers for the leadership.

Mr Blair's posture during the forthcoming leadership election was one of the main sticking points during two heated private meetings on Wednesday.

In between the shouting and accusations of blackmail, the two men attempted to thrash out the terms of a private letter to be sent by Mr Blair to Mr Brown, committing to a departure in February in exchange for a last public show of support from the Chancellor. The strategy had been agreed in advance between Mr Blair and his old ally Peter Mandelson, to whom the PM has once again turned for advice in a moment of severe crisis.

When Mr Brown emerged, grinning, he had agreed to only half a deal. He would say it was a matter for Mr Blair when he went, and the latter would confirm he was going within a year.

If it was a moment of private triumph, its capture on film enraged a bruised Downing Street. Soon Westminster was buzzing with speculation about the identity of the cabinet minister who told the BBC's Nick Robinson that Gordon Brown would be an "effing disaster" as PM.

Elsewhere other occupants of No 10 were seeking to exact their revenge on those they blamed for precipitating the crisis. Cherie Blair, appalled that former loyalist Chris Bryant was among the 2001 signatories, is said to have phoned an activist in his Rhondda constituency to vent her spleen at his treachery.

The Prime Minister's wife is also said to have begged John Reid to challenge Mr Brown. He, however, has told friends that his wife, Carine Adler, is bitterly opposed to what she knows could be a traumatic contest.

Instead, Brown-haters' hopes increasingly rest with Alan Johnson, a relaxed, open figure who is nonetheless a formidable political operator. Mr Johnson led the loyalists' resistance to demands that the PM name a day at the beginning of the week, denying that there was a cabinet revolt over the issue.

The Education Secretary was rewarded by having a long-planned visit to a north London school hijacked by No 10 looking for a suitable platform for the Prime Minister to make his concession. "I have brought Alan with me," Mr Blair told pupils at the Quintin Kynaston school. "You've got to have a friend. At least I've got one," he added to laughter.

In the supercharged atmosphere of the week, the remark has been interpreted as an endorsement. Allies of Mr Johnson dismiss it as "just a joke".

Mr Johnson himself has not made up his mind whether to upgrade his deputy leadership campaign for a tilt at the top job. He thinks it unlikely that anyone can beat Mr Brown but dislikes efforts to push would-be contenders out of the race in advance.

This weekend Labour's whips are hard at work ringing MPs to tell them that No 10 has listened to the concerns about Mr Blair's departure and has called its attack dogs off Mr Brown.

They are also hinting that the Prime Minister is likely to expand on his timetable in the near future, something that is being interpreted by many as a signal that Mr Blair will tell his party conference he is going to resign as leader in February.

For the moment the airwaves are filled with the clamour of Labour politicians urging a period of silence, apparently unconscious of the irony of their demands. The start of the TUC conference this week, not to mention Labour's own gathering the week after next, ensures the party has no time to lick its wounds in private. The politicking will be all the more intense since there are not one but two top jobs up for grabs. A flavour of what is to come is delivered today by Peter Hain, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Wales, who in effect launches his bid for John Prescott's job in an interview for The Independent on Sunday.

Paradoxically the one politician who might actually be looking forward to the Manchester gathering is Mr Blair himself. A foretaste of his reception was the thunderous applause he got as he rose to address a conference of activists yesterday. "And I have not even gone yet!" he joked to cheers.

Wait till he tells them he's off for good. If Manchester turns into an adulatory goodbye party, who knows what might happen to Mr Brown's campaign.

As the minister said, they didn't get the body.