Senior members of Tony Blair's staff are openly discussing a possible successor to Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's spokesman and closest and longest-serving adviser who is believed to be on the verge of resigning.
Staff are talking about whether Blair will promote someone from inside his office or headhunt someone from political journalism, as he did with Campbell.
Such speculation is potentially destabilizing when the government is at its most vulnerable since taking power six years ago.
Campbell on Friday passed up a chance to deny it outright, saying instead: "I would respectfully suggest it is wishful thinking."
Campbell has discussed with friends, however, what he might do outside the government, according to close colleagues.
Blair's staff say they are increasingly convinced he is considering whether to depart in September when Fiona Millar, his partner and press secretary to Tony Blair's wife Cherie Blair, is expected to leave her job.
"It's pretty clear that, the way his mind is working, he will go," said a well-placed government figure.
"But he wants the summer to make up his mind. It's a big decision, it will be a big wrench," the source said.
A former tabloid newspaper journalist, Campbell, 46, has exercised unprecedented power as a communications chief and was dubbed "the real deputy prime minister" when it emerged his influence extended far beyond media matters.
He was censured by the UK's House of Commons foreign affairs committee over his role in February's so-called dodgy dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
He has also picked a very public fight with BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan, members of parliament deciding the reporter was wrong to accuse Campbell of inserting a 45-minute warning into a September dossier.
Campbell, who retreated into the shadows after the 2001 election when he ceased briefing parliamentary journalists every day, gave evidence to the committee and appeared on TV.
One colleague said if Campbell announced now that he was to go, it would appear that he had lost the battle with the BBC.
"How could he do it now with the BBC row? You would get huge conspiracy theories," argued the government official, who said the reason for both Campbell and Millar wanting to leave was that "you get to a stage where you want to do something else."
Campbell's exit would cost Mr Blair one of his most valuable courtiers.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to