Blair told the Cabinet officially this morning that he is to resign as the leader of the Labour Party but will stay on for seven weeks until his successor is chosen.

 

That is widely expected to be the Chancellor Gordon Brown, who could have different ideas to Blair about how the build-up to the 2012 Olympics should be handled.

 

Among the changes he is reportedly thinking about is taking the project out of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and place it in another Whitehall department such as the Cabinet Office or Ruth Kelly's Department for Communities and Local Government.

 

The Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell is known to be strongly opposed to this course of action and has held private meetings with Brown recently to try to convince him to let her continue to oversee the London preparations.

 

But experts agree that London would not have won the Olympics if Blair had not been such an enthusiastic supporter of the idea.

 

He wooed many members of the International Olympic Committee to vote for London on the eve of the election in Singapore on July 6 2005 by travelling to the Far East and personally meeting as many of them as he could before travelling back to Britain to host the G8 summit at Gleneagles.

 

"The four votes that were in it (the amount London beat Paris by) were definitely because he was in town," said Ireland's Patrick Hickey, president of the European Olympic Committee.

 

"If he hadn’t come here, those votes were lost”.