THE prime minister suffered another blow to his authority last night when it was claimed that his chief lieutenant, Ed Balls, accused him of “bottling it”.

Balls is said to have thrown the accusation of cowardice at the height of the war to topple Tony Blair last year.

“You bottled it,” he is reported to have snapped after Gordon Brown failed to deliver the fatal blow when Blair was at his most vulnerable.

The news that the prime minister’s most trusted protégé thought Brown lacked courage comes only days after he was also accused of “bottling out” of an expected general election.

Balls’s angry accusation is reported in extracts from a new edition of Blair’s biography by Anthony Seldon.

Balls last night “categorically denied” the claim. Sources close to the prime minister reportedly accused Blair allies of trying to use Seldon’s book as a “crude attempt” to undermine the government.

Seldon writes that Brown’s inner circle went “completely mad” when he pulled back from the coup de grace in an interview on May 5 last year.

It was at the height of the so-called May coup, the day after Labour had performed dreadfully in local elections.

Balls and others had prepared him to call on Radio 4 for a leadership change. Instead he said: “We have got to renew ourselves . . . it must start now.”

The book, Blair Unbound, also describes Blair’s “personal concerns” about Brown’s “dark side” . . . his paranoia and his inability to communicate.

It reveals details of two other putsch attempts last year. The “March coup” came after Jack Dromey, the party treasurer, revealed he had not been told about tycoons’ loans to Labour.

No 10 was convinced Brown and Dromey’s wife Harriet Harman were behind the outburst. She had been seen in the Treasury that afternoon, an aide told Seldon. According to a No 10 aide, Brown then met Blair and the latter’s account ran: “All he would say is, ‘When are you going to f-off?’ ” Downing Street later disbelieved Brown’s denials of involvement in the “September coup”, which led to the resignation from the government of some of the plotters and an announcement by Blair that he would quit this year.

But Seldon writes that Blair felt so battered by his treatment that he confided: “I feel like an abused and bullied wife.”

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