Speculation mounted on Saturday that Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair might stand down early, despite the exposure as fakes of shocking torture photographs of reported abuses by British troops in Iraq.
Blair appeared to score a moral victory on Saturday after the Daily Mirror newspaper sacked its editor for publishing the pictures and ran a front-page apology under the banner headline: "Sorry .. We Were Hoaxed."
But Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott acknowledged in an interview published late Friday that ministers were currently positioning themselves for a power scramble in anticipation of Blair leaving office.
Asked by The Times newspaper whether senior ministers were preparing themselves for post-Blair life, Prescott was surprisingly frank.
"Yes, people do talk about it and you get that discussion... every British prime minister goes eventually," he said, while insisting that there was no chance of a coup inside the ruling Labour party to remove the premier.
Prescott's comments mark the first time a senior member of Blair's team has talked openly about the chance that the increasingly embattled premier could step down.
A series of pictures, first printed on May 1, which appeared to show British troops beating and urinating on an Iraqi in the back of an army truck, plunged Blair into the latest crisis surrounding the government's involvement in Iraq.
But doubts were swiftly raised about equipment and a truck seen in the pictures, and on Thursday Britain's Ministry of Defence announced that an investigation had shown they could not have been taken in Iraq.
The Daily Mirror publicly apologised on Saturday, a day after sacking its editor of nine years, Piers Morgan. The Queen's Lancashire Regiment has welcomed Morgan's departure, seen as a moral victory for Blair's government, under pressure over reported abuses by both British and US troops in Iraq.
Late Friday, a soldier identified only as "Soldier C" who had made claims of mistreatment in the Daily Mirror, said in a television interview he had seen Iraqi prisoners "beaten for fun."
And the defence ministry announced Saturday that four British troops had been arrested, but later released with no charge, as part of the investigation into the prisoner abuse.