Blair's week of shock and awe on the world stage

Key players have abandoned diplomatic niceties and laid their cards on the table. Now the Prime Minister is more exposed than ever, his arguments scorned, his future under threat. By Andy McSmith and David Usborne

Today, Tony Blair can give thanks to his enemies for helping him when he is in a hole. As his diplomatic strategy for building an international coalition against Iraq sank in dismal failure, the Prime Minister ended the week in a stronger position than he began. For that, he can thank his political opponents.

First, there was Clare Short, the Secretary of State for International Development, who stormed into a studio last weekend to lay down the terms on which she was prepared to support an invasion.

As the interview progressed, Ms Short's eloquence overcame caution, as she suggested that going to war without the specific authority of the United Nations Security Council would be "reckless – reckless for the world, reckless for the undermining of the UN, reckless with our government, reckless with his own future".

After an outburst like that, it was almost unthinkable that Ms Short could stay in the Cabinet, but during the week that followed she neither resigned, nor was sacked. By the weekend she was claiming to be "optimistic" about developments, causing her bemused colleagues to wonder whether she intended to stay in office after all.

Her behaviour contrasted with that of the quietly spoken Andy Reed, who had been parliamentary aide to the Secretary of State for the Environment, Margaret Beckett. Mr Reed had resigned several days earlier, after deciding that he could not vote for the government policy on Iraq, telling no one but his boss that he was going.

Last week, the Reed family went for a weekend in the West Country, and were surprised to return home to find journalists on the doorstep, reacting to rumours that Mr Reed was about to go.

"I was a relative unknown with a very small job, and now I'm a relative unknown without that very small job," Mr Reed said yesterday.

If Mr Blair can be thankful that his best known cabinet critic is so erratic, he should be even more grateful that the leader of the main opposition party is so hopeless.

Throughout the greatest political crisis of the Blair premiership, Iain Duncan Smith has striven to be statesmanlike, thus making sure that whoever benefits from Mr Blair's political difficulties, it will not be the Conservatives.

At Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday, however, Mr Duncan Smith decided to try a little party political gamesmanship by taunting Mr Blair about the split in his Cabinet. But the shot was too easy for an experienced player like Tony Blair, who handled it with grace and humour.

Mr Blair also had reason to thank the producers of Tonight with Trevor McDonald who organised a television studio confrontation between the Prime Minister and a group of women opposed to the war, including one whose boyfriend had been killed by the Bali bomb, another whose son was killed on 11 September and one whose husband is in Iraq as a human shield.

On the face of it, the programme was a disaster for Mr Blair, who struggled under hostile questioning and was slow-handclapped at the end. However, that was not necessarily typical. In North Shields, the Labour Party runs a call centre where people can ring up to talk about the state of the party. After the programme, the production team took 80 lengthy calls, 28 from party members, the rest from members of the public.

The callers were heavily on Mr Blair's side, believing that he had been treated unfairly by the audience. One north of England MP who has been a critic of the war was surprised to receive a call from a constituent who was so impressed by Mr Blair's performance on that programme that she wanted to join the party.

That same night, Jacques Chirac, the French President, confirmed his position as the Foreign Office's favourite enemy of the week, when he went on French TV and uttered the words "Whatever happens, we will vote no."

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, refused to believe that this is what M. Chirac had actually said, until he read it inLe Monde the next day.

Mr Straw has spent a frenetic week trying to secure the elusive second United Nations resolution, authorising war. No one can call the Foreign Secretary a slouch. During the week, he spoke to Colin Powell 21 times, the Spanish Foreign Minister five times, his Mexican and Chilean counterparts three times each, plus the foreign ministers of Russia, Germany, Japan, Cameroon, Guinea and France.

The main purpose of all this effort was to persuade the so-called "U6" countries – the half dozen undecided members of the Security Council – to support a British proposal to impose a deadline on Saddam Hussein to comply with UN weapons inspections by 17 March, or be attacked.

Whether Mr Straw would have secured a second resolution if the French had kept silent all week is a moot point, but when M. Chirac appeared to be saying that the French would veto the resolution even if a majority of the Security Council voted for it, the job was made that much harder. It also gave Mr Straw someone to blame if British diplomacy failed. He decided to prepare Labour MPs at their weekly meeting on Wednesday for the prospect of war without specific UN backing.

For the Government, the first pleasant surprise of the week was the packed meeting of Labour MPs that went far more smoothly than they had anticipated. They had been helped, curiously, by reports that left-wing MPs were conspiring to remove Tony Blair from office, which turned out to be the most important occasion of the week in which the Prime Minister could be thankful for the behaviour of his enemies.

The Campaign Group of Labour MPs, the left-wing alliance fingered as the plotters in this story, insist that the conspiracy existed only in the minds of Downing Street. One of their members, John McDonnell, had written to the main trade unions several weeks earlier, proposing that there should be a special party conference at which Mr Blair could be confronted by his critics over the gamut of left-wing causes, including Iraq, the NHS, and the firefighters' strike.

If the left had been thinking of organising a direct challenge to Mr Blair's position, a special conference would have to be the way to do it, but Mr McDonnell is adamant that the event he was trying to organise would have been about "issues, not personalities".

However, last weekend, the Linlithgow constituency party, whose local MP is the party's most senior and most maverick, Tam Dalyell, went a step further, saying that Mr Blair should "consider his own position in relation to being leader of the party". Yesterday, he also called for Mr Straw to be sacked.

On Tuesday night another MP, Hilton Dawson, not a member of the organised left, said in the House of Commons that Mr Blair should "consider his position".

Whether this was loose talk or an organised conspiracy, by Wednesday morning there was a strong suspicion in the Westminster corridors that the left was embarking on the opening moves of a campaign to remove the Prime Minister.

It enraged Diana Organ, one of the 121 Labour MPs who rebelled against the Government over Iraq, and may do so again this week. The MPs who packed in to hear Mr Straw on Wednesday also heard an impassioned speech from Mrs Organ, in which she said that the issue was Iraq, not Mr Blair's position as Prime Minister.

The same point was made by a new MP, Tom Harris, who said afterwards: "I was equivocal about whether we should go to war without a second resolution, but I now think this has been turned into a vote of confidence in Tony Blair, and if that's what it has been turned into, I'm completely unequivocal."

Meanwhile at the UN, the British diplomatic game may have been critically ill, but amazingly it was not quite dead. Diplomats from the "U6" countries – Pakistan, Guinea, Cameroon, Angola, Mexico and Chile – had been asking what precisely Saddam Hussein would have to do to convince London and Washington that he had heeded the world's appeals and was serious about disarming.

Britain's ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, had spent part of Tuesday locked in talks with the chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, and on Wednesday the Foreign Office came forward with six specific tests for Saddam to pass, which Mr Blix had helped to choose. Among them was a demand that he should appear on television, confess to Iraq's past sins, and promise instant good behaviour.

Several hours later, a written version reached UN headquarters in New York. Oddly, it seemed to be the Iraqis who got hold of it first and started disseminating it to reporters, so that even before Sir Jeremy strode into the Council chamber late on Wednesday formally to propose the British benchmarks, the atmosphere in the building was one of distinct antagonism.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian envoy, was heard complaining that the British had failed to tell Moscow what it was up to. "Maybe that is their strategy," he snorted. France had already shot down the tests – even before Baghdad said anything. Even Sir Jeremy himself hardly seemed confident of his own government's tactics, conceding to one British interviewer that he was engaged in trying to "patch a sinking ship".

And for better or worse, the tests – and no one had any idea how far the 17 March deadline could be extended – drew no cheers from the US. British officials were sanguine about the American diffidence, however. The point, they said, was to show that "we were stretching the elastic of all sides, including American elastic". But the Wednesday meeting went very badly. Lavrov and his French counterpart, Jean-Marc de la Sablière, were openly scornful. Washington officials were busily briefing that they were close to winning over the U6, including Guinea and Angola. Few in New York believed it.

At about 8.30am on Thursday, Mr Straw hurried into No 10 Downing Street to tell Mr Blair that, no matter how sceptical, the U6 governments had not yet said "No", and therefore the diplomacy could be stretched over the weekend – though even the Foreign Secretary accepted that Monday would have to be the limit.

Afterwards, Mr Straw stepped outside to give an impromptu press conference, in which he directed his fire at the French for their "extraordinary" decision to reject Britain's proposals "without proper consideration."

That helped to inspire the front page of the following day's Sun, in which photographs of Saddam Hussein and Jacques Chirac appeared side by side over the caption; "One is a corrupt bully who is risking the lives of our troops. He is sneering at Britain, destroying democracy and endangering world peace. The other is Saddam Hussein."

When the Cabinet assembled, they were expecting to hear from Clare Short, but the International Development Secretary was mute, leaving it to the Leader of the Commons, Robin Cook, to make the case against immediate military action. Though he did not say so, his colleagues assumed that Mr Cook was delivering a veiled warning that he, too, will resign if Britain goes to war without UN backing.

As the day wore on, the desperation of the British position at the UN headquarters was palpable. Apparently affronted by American presumption, the President of Guinea let it be know that in fact his country was likely to abstain. The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, hardly helped by publicly suggesting that one option was simply to abandon all efforts to get a vote on the resolution and withdraw it from the table. But still the indefatigable, but increasingly haggard, Sir Jeremy pressed on in best stiff-upper-lip style.

He tried another tricky manoeuvre. He told the Six (by then he had largely given up on France and Russia) that Britain would remove the ultimatum from the resolution as such and insert it into the appended statement containing the six tests, known as a side statement. (Reporters had dubbed it "a sidecar".)

That too fell flat. "Do they think we are stupid?" one Latin diplomat asked in exasperation. For him, it did not matter where the ultimatum sat. It was still an ultimatum. Britain was also signalling that it would drop from its list the demand that Saddam expose himself on Iraqi television, an idea that had been greeted with virtual ridicule by most other council delegations.

M. de la Sablière was blunt after ambassadors emerged from another marathon session on Thursday. The British ideas still "had no support," he sserted. That was perhaps a bit unfair – Bulgaria seemed keen, but then it has always been in the Anglo-American corral – but the truth was obvious. The traction that Britain was frantically seeking for its proposals simply wasn't materialising. That afternoon, Tony Blair received a phone call from Washington inviting him to a summit of three pro-war Security Council countries in the Azores.

By Friday, the situation seemed all but hopeless. Chile abruptly came forward with a variation on the British project with five tests included for Saddam. But it gave the Iraqi leaders three weeks to complete his conversion and the American reaction, at least, was entirely predictable. It was, blurted Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, a "non-starter".

When Pakistan's envoy to the UN, Munir Akram, was asked on Friday whether the push for a second resolution was now dead, his less than sunny response was: "Everything is alive until we declare that everything is dead."

In the next few days, probably, Britain will go to war, although all Tony Blair's optimistic forecasts of a second UN resolution have turned to dust. This will provoke a domestic political crisis, but it is not likely to be so great that it brings down the Prime Minister – at least, not at once.

But when the smoke over Baghdad has cleared, Mr Blair will still have to live with the Labour MPs who feel personally let down, because he promised that war would be waged through the "UN route".

Over the horizon there loom other big issues, such as NHS reform and an increase in student fees, which are threatening to trigger large rebellions. Each rebellion gains recruits from previous rebellions until, in the end, Mr Blair's strained relations with his party must surely approach breaking point.

As one experienced Labour MP put it: "If there is a quick and relatively clean war, the public will probably forgive Tony Blair for being proved right – but the Labour Party will never forgive him, even if he is proved right."

As he sits down today in the sunshine of the Azores with a right-wing President of the US and the right-wing Prime Minister of Spain, Mr Blair might reflect that if his enemies cannot destroy him, his choice of friends might.