Read the Red Box blog on the Miliband saga

Gordon Brown has pressed David Miliband to cancel a trip to India as he prepares the way to reshuffle his Cabinet.

The Prime Minister has ordered a series of meetings with his most senior ministers at the start of next month as he seeks to restore his authority, The Times has learnt.

The meetings — which include two so-called political sessions of Cabinet and an awayday — indicate that Mr Brown could be planning to reshuffle his ministers within weeks.

News of Mr Brown’s preparations to relaunch his embattled administration emerged after Mr Miliband cancelled the official trip to India between September 7 and 10.

Instead the Foreign Secretary took to the airwaves to defend himself after being denounced by the Prime Minister’s allies as self-serving and disloyal for a newspaper article in which he set out his vision for Labour’s future without making any mention of Mr Brown.

The Prime Minister signalled a retreat from internal civil war in the Labour Party yesterday after the anonymous briefings backfired.

A spokesman for Mr Brown said: “As we said yesterday, we agree with David that the whole party should pull together, take the fight to the Tories and focus on dealing with the real issues affecting people’s lives.”

On a second day of media appearances, a smiling Mr Miliband signed autographs after delivering a robust defence of his right to “advance a vision for the Government”.

“I think the worst thing at the moment would be if we all went mute,” he said during a radio phone-in, adding that the “easy thing” would have been to go “on holiday and hunker down” after the Glasgow East by-election defeat.

“Actually, I am here this week, I am doing my job. I am doing my job as Foreign Secretary, but part of my job is to defend the record of the Government and advance a vision for the Government,” he told the Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2.

Mr Brown, who is on holiday in Suffolk, has been criticised for failing to rally Labour morale after the party’s disastrous performance. But Mr Miliband was careful not to hand his enemies evidence of open disloyalty during the hour-long interview. “I am not running a leadership campaign. I have always wanted to support Gordon’s leadership,” he said. However, in an assured performance, the Foreign Secretary joked that listeners who rang and urged him to stand against Mr Brown were not relatives.

A caller identified only as Mandy, from Barnsley, told the Foreign Secretary to “put up a leadership challenge and get that God-awful man Brown out”, while Sheila Taylor, from Cheltenham, told him: “You are the sort of person we need as prime minister. You can lead a party. You have the optimism. Mr Brown hasn’t.”

Earlier two Labour MPs demanded that Mr Brown dismiss Mr Miliband for disloyalty.

Geraldine Smith said that he had “overstepped the line”. Bob Marshall-Andrews accused him of “duplicitous” behaviour.

Mr Miliband was given strong support by the former minister Denis MacShane, who called for an end to anonymous attacks.

Although Mr Miliband leaves for a two-week holiday in Minorca tomorrow, the Prime Minister’s allies are braced for further attacks by those seeking to advance his cause while protecting him from accusations of plotting.

Mr Brown may garner some encouragement from a YouGov poll in today’s Daily Telegraph, which records that Labour support would decrease from 25 per cent under Mr Brown to 24 per cent under Mr Miliband.

With Tony Blair back as leader, Labour would leap to 32 per cent against the Tories at 41 per cent.

Mr Brown faces an acute dilemma about what to do with Mr Miliband in the reshuffle, an event that was supposed to relaunch his administration next month.

Although Downing Street sources dismiss speculation that he would appoint Mr Miliband as his Chancellor, thus binding him still more closely to the Government’s fortunes, one ally said that this was among options under consideration. The senior figure added, however, that the “nuclear option” of dismissing Mr Miliband had not been discounted.

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