THE White House has been insisting for months that Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida and President George W Bush’s younger brother, will not run for president in 2008. But Republicans are beginning to wonder if he will become vice-president instead.

Washington was agog last week at reports that the governor, 52, may join forces with Senator John McCain, one of the frontrunners for the 2008 Republican nomination, in what could turn into a clash of political dynasties.

Senator Hillary Clinton has also set her sights on the White House. Senior Republican officials believe that widespread qualms about the Bush family’s stranglehold on American politics will be defused if the wife of former President Bill Clinton emerges as the Democratic party nominee.

“They can’t play the dynasty card against us with a Clinton on their ticket,” a Republican strategist claimed.

While Jeb Bush is still considered highly unlikely to attempt to succeed his brother as president, he has emerged as a potentially formidable running mate for McCain, the maverick Arizona senator who challenged George Bush for the Republican nomination five years ago.

Despite years of animosity between the Bushes and McCain — who accused his rival of orchestrating personal smears during the 2000 primary campaign — the 68-year-old senator made up with the incumbent president last year.

The senator’s support proved particularly valuable to Bush after Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, let it be known that he was courting McCain for a non-partisan cross-party ticket. Kerry’s overtures died when McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner during the Vietnam war, made it clear that he had no intention of publicly opposing Bush.

McCain’s main rivals for the Republican nomination all have potentially fatal defects. Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, is wildly popular across America but is regarded as a dangerous liberal by powerful conservatives.

Senator Bill Frist, the Tennessee doctor who leads his party in the Senate, is seen as a dull performer who blotted his copybook by offering a bogus medical opinion in the case of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman at the centre of a right-to-die controversy earlier this year. Frist said she should be kept alive, but an autopsy released last week confirmed her brain was all but destroyed by a stroke she had suffered years earlier.

Jeb Bush was also criticised for his efforts to keep Schiavo alive and he aroused further controversy on Friday by ordering an investigation into the actions of Schiavo’s husband, Michael, at the time of her collapse. Michael Schiavo described suggestions that he had delayed seeking help for his stricken wife as “sickening”.

Senior Republican strategists said that Jeb Bush was the perfect foil for McCain, who is conservative on security and fiscal policy but frequently breaks with his party on social issues — much to the disgust of conservative Republicans who refer to the senator scathingly as “Komrade McCain”.

John Podhoretz, a conservative commentator who writes for the New York Post, noted that the perfect Republican candidate would have to be acceptable to the Christian right on abortion, would need to appeal to Hispanics and should probably have southern credentials because the South is where Republicans are strongest. Jeb Bush fits the bill.

Even Podhoretz acknowledges that voters might rebel at the prospect of another Bush in the White House — at least in 2008. “Let’s face it,” he said, “that would just be incredibly weird.”

Yet a number two spot behind McCain might be just the Bush family ticket, especially if the Democrats choose Clinton. “You don’t hear anybody saying that Hillary shouldn’t be president because her husband was,” said Podhoretz. “So you are beginning to hear some Republicans quietly murmuring about Jeb.”

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Times Charity Appeal: SolarAid
• Is it Black Monday all over again for Dubai?
• Behind the scenes at the biggest deal