In victory the leader of the 10p rebellion heaped faint praise on the Prime Minister. Touring the TV studios, Frank Field said he hoped that from now on Gordon Brown would be “big enough” to admit it when he had made other mistakes. “We may, I hope, be marking phase two of Gordon Brown’s premiership.”

In another interview he said: “You can be strong in the sense that, ‘I make the decisions like Napoleon and I carry them out irrespective of what the consequences might be’, or you make the decisions and on those where you find the consequences are not as you planned you don’t actually screw up people’s lives.”

No one in Westminster judges malice quite as finely as the arch, meticulous, dogged Labour MP for Birkenhead. The roots of his antipathy with Mr Brown stretch deep into Labour’s wilderness years. The first bitter fruits were borne in new Labour’s glory years when Tony Blair made Mr Field his first welfare minister: brutal confrontation with a Chancellor jealous of the issue was inevitable.

Mr Brown’s allies were not sparing in the humiliation that was heaped on Mr Field when he was sacked after just a year. His welfare plans had been “paltry and unworkable”. They mocked him for his distinction between the feckless and deserving poor. “Never has a man gone so far in politics on so little,” sniffed one.

It is true that his background is modest. He was born into a working-class family 65 years ago. He went to grammar school in North London and has told how a sadistic form master tore up his university application forms as a “daily humiliation”.

Single-minded toughness served him well when he defeated Militant in Birkenhead. Few would accuse him of inconsistency even if they believe he has been consistently wrong. A profile in 1984 described him as a “priestlike crusader against poverty” and a “rebel and resigner who believes his is the only valid conscience and tactics”.

He has been an unwavering critic of Mr Brown’s use of tax credits to lift people out of poverty, worrying away at that complex policy’s unintended consequences for a decade. After every Budget it has been Mr Field who has unearthed the inconvenient truths. He has pointed out where the poverty trap has been deepened by the extension of means-tested credits and was among the first to say that they would be too complex for many to claim.

Other, less divisive Labour MPs sought to lead the 10p rebellion but none could say as he could that they had opposed its introduction last year. Although hardly popular among his colleagues, Mr Field retains his tribal rights. He was too smart to accept David Cameron’s offer to form a cross-party policy group in 2005.

The meeting on Tuesday night in which Mr Field gave his terms to Mr Brown would not have been warm. There is, perhaps, a sneaking respect for the man he cast out of office a decade ago. Both share more than they would like to admit, including a personal rigidity. Soon after being made Prime Minister, Mr Brown tried to hug his old enemy, an incident that Mr Field related to friends with ill-con-cealed horror. Yesterday Mr Field returned the embrace – with even less sincerity.

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