In 1997 an eight-man assassination squad burst into Morgan Tsvangirai's tenth-floor office in Harare and tried to force him through the window. He was saved by his secretary's screams, but was left lying in a pool of blood.

In 2002 grainy film emerged of Mr Tsvangirai purportedly plotting with a former Israeli intelligence agent to assassinate President Mugabe. He was charged with treason and for two years a death sentence hung over his head until a judge decided that he had been framed.

In 2007 he was arrested, beaten and tortured for attending a banned opposition meeting. His skull was cracked and pictures of his bruised and bloodied face shocked the world.

Over the past decade Mr Tsvangirai has survived at least three assassination attempts, numerous death threats and repeated assaults, beatings and imprisonments. Hundreds of his fellow activists have been abducted, tortured and killed. He is denounced regularly as a Western stooge and his wife and the youngest of his six children live in Johannesburg for their safety. But yesterday he became Zimbabwe's Prime Minister and from now on he must work in tandem with the man ultimately responsible for all that violence.

Mr Tsvangirai, 56, has proved beyond doubt his courage, tenacity and personal integrity. He is Zimbabwe's most popular and charismatic politician. The question now, however, is whether this gregarious, easygoing politician has the savvy, cunning and ruthlessness required to take on the wily Old Crocodile, of whose credentials as Zimbabwe's liberation leader, and education, he remains in awe.

Mr Tsvangirai was an early supporter of Mr Mugabe's - “I would have laid down my life for him,” he has often said. Even today, after all Mr Mugabe has done to destroy Zimbabwe and Mr Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), he remains “conflicted”, say sources who know him well.

“It's like forcing your father from the family business,” said one. “I think he's reluctant to destroy Mugabe.”

Mr Tsvangirai was the eldest of nine children born to a poor bricklayer. He excelled at school but had to leave at 16 to support his siblings. While peers became freedom fighters, and as Mr Mugabe amassed degrees while imprisoned by the Rhodesian authorities, Mr Tsvangirai began work as a sweeper in a textile factory, moved to a nickel mine as a plant operator, and became an increasingly active trade unionist.

He rose through the ranks until in 1988 he became secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, a position that brought him into conflict with the regime. In 1999 he helped to found the MDC to resist Zimbabwe's slide towards dictatorship, and in 2000 the grassroots party handed Mr Mugabe his first electoral defeat when voters rejected constitutional changes to expand the President's powers.

Since then Mr Mugabe has fought off the MDC's growing challenge through relentless violence, repression and vote-rigging. Last year the MDC won Zimbabwe's parliamentary elections, and had the party not split in 2005 Mr Tsvangirai would undoubtedly have won such a resounding first-round victory in the presidential contest that not even Zanu (PF) could have rigged the result. In the event it was able to claim that Mr Tsvangirai had won just less than the 50 per cent required to avoid a run-off, and then unleashed such terror against MDC supporters that Mr Tsvangirai withdrew days before the vote.

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