A SENIOR Whitehall insider has alleged that David Blunkett intimidated officials into "fast-tracking" a visa for his former lover's nanny.

According to the insider, the home secretary called a meeting over backlogs in applications at which he showed senior civil servants an official letter to the nanny saying that she faced a 12-month wait.

Blunkett is said to have "hit the roof" when the officials claimed they were clearing the backlogs. The insider, who has detailed knowledge of the events, said Blunkett then used the letter to prove them wrong.

Following the meeting, a Home Office official called immigration headquarters and asked that the nanny's application should be "sorted", according to the insider. Within days, her application was approved.

This weekend sources close to Blunkett said he is determined not to quit over the visa row and believes that he is safe because of the support of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He has told friends he will allow nobody to claim his "scalp". He believes he has done nothing wrong and will be cleared by an official inquiry.

The insider's account of Blunkett's meeting with his officials in May is the first to suggest that Blunkett raised the delay in the nanny's application with mandarins. Previously the Home Office had maintained that officials did no more than check the application of Leoncia Casalme, the nanny of Blunkett's former lover Kimberly Quinn.

Within days of the meeting Casalme, from the Philippines, received a letter approving her application for "indefinite leave to remain" in Britain. It is this that is being investigated by Sir Alan Budd, a former Treasury mandarin, whose report is expected within the next 10 days.

The insider's disclosure signals a backlash by civil servants who find themselves compromised by the home secretary's actions. The insider — a senior official in the Home Office — said Blunkett arrived at the meeting with the letter to Casalme from his officials.

The letter, dated April 23, 2003, said Casalme would probably have to wait 12 months for her visa. Friends of Quinn have previously claimed she gave the letter directly to Blunkett.

The insider said: "Blunkett raised it by asking why there were all these delays. The answer came back that officials were working on the problem but that there weren't really any delays. At this point Blunkett hit the roof and threw the letter at [John] Gieve [the Home Office's permanent secretary] and said 'What about this then?'

"He was talking about general delays but used this letter to make the point that he felt he was being misled by officials, that there were delays that they weren't telling him about."

The insider said the Casalme letter was taken by an official. "A phone call was then made to the casework team at Croydon [headquarters of the immigration department] to pull the file with the instruction to get this sorted."

The insider said Casalme had her application approved on May 12, within three days of the telephone call.

News of the alleged confrontation with Gieve will reinforce the view in Whitehall that relations between the minister and his most senior official are tense. A new biography of Blunkett last week disclosed that he had wanted to replace Gieve but had decided that it would cause him too many problems.

Last night a Home Office spokesman declined to comment ahead of the Budd report.

Blunkett has lost the support of some ministers and Labour MPs because of his critical comments about colleagues in the biography. Jack Straw, the foreign secretary and Blunkett's predecessor as home secretary, was unhappy at comments that the Home Office was left in "a giant mess" by Straw.

"It was a very foolish and annoying thing for Blunkett to have done," said one of Straw's allies. "You don't criticise your predecessor in a job. If you've got a problem you just keep quiet about it."

Charles Clarke, Blunkett's successor as education secretary, is believed to have been upset that Blunkett thought he had failed to continue his drive to raise standards. When Blunkett contacted him to apologise last week, Clarke is said to have produced a graph to prove that school performance had improved since Blunkett had left.

Some former ministers and senior Labour MPs predicted Blunkett's demise. Yesterday ministerial colleagues added to the criticism. One said: "He has been irretrievably stupid. A bloody idiot." Another colleague said: "His criticism of colleagues has been a real turning point. I think he has gone from a position of having the support of a lot of colleagues to having the support of none."

Blunkett has privately admitted that he made "a misjudgment" in co-operating with the book by Stephen Pollard. "I am determined to build friendships. My job is to rebuild," he told a friend last week.

Ever since Quinn's claims that Blunkett had fast-tracked her nanny's visa were published two weeks ago, the home secretary has denied he intervened personally to speed up the procedure. His aides have admitted he brought Casalme's application form into his office for officials to look over to check that it was in "good order". But they denied that the application form was processed internally, saying it was sent back to her after being checked.

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said he planned to table parliamentary questions asking for minutes of the alleged meeting to be published: "If this new account is correct then the home secretary is in deep trouble. It is beneath contempt that yet again Home Office ministers would try to make civil servants carry the can for their own behaviour."

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