The megaphone diplomacy coming from Hillary Clinton’s camp yesterday was loud and clear: she wants to be secretary of state and should “go for it”, according to her close friends and advisers.

As Clinton pondered her political future, the coterie known as Hillaryland had already begun celebrating the return of one half of the world’s most famous power couple to the global stage.

President-elect Barack Obama, her former rival and nemesis, had not formally offered Clinton the job but the word was it was “hers if she wants it” after the two met for private talks in Chicago. The appointment of Clinton, 60, as America’s top diplomat would be a dramatic coda to a presidential election that never lost its power to excite and surprise.

Obama’s initiative could unite the two clashing power centres of the party while acting as a “force multiplier” for American diplomacy, according to the president-elect’s closest advisers.

“She would be fantastic. Hillary Clinton has an international reputation and relationship with the world’s leaders,” a senior Obama adviser said.

The former first lady had claimed she was running for president to “restore America’s standing in the world” – and this could be her second chance. It would also enable her to be at the end of a red telephone at 3am in the event of an international crisis, the theme of her most vicious anti-Obama campaign advertisement.

At the time Susan Rice, Obama’s senior foreign policy adviser, scoffed that one did not acquire experience “merely by being married to a commander-in-chief”. The Obama camp also ridiculed “Snipergate”, Clinton’s claim to have landed in Bosnia under fire in the 1990s when television footage showed otherwise.

All has been forgiven after the graciousness with which Clinton campaigned for Obama after the end of the Democratic primary – a test of her diplomatic skills. “She did over 60 events for us. She put her heart and soul into getting Obama elected,” an Obama aide said.

John Podesta, the head of Obama’s transition team, and Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, are known to favour Clinton’s appointment even though there has been no official confirmation of the offer.

“Sometimes silence is confirming,” said James Carville, one of the Clintons’ best-known confidants who noted that Obama officials were not shooting down the rumours. He added: “As an American, I hope and pray that she takes it.”

Further encouragement for Clinton came from Terry McAuliffe, her presidential campaign chairman. “She’s a spectacular senator and healthcare is something she wants to battle on,” he said. “But as secretary of state she would have 100% name ID and she is a beloved figure who is continually rated the most admired woman in the world.”

The political rumour mill went into overdrive on Thursday when Clinton boarded a plane to Chicago on “personal” business. Later that day a black motorcade was seen leaving Obama’s transition office in Chicago – the former first lady always travels with secret service protection – and news of the talks between the two Democratic party titans leaked.

Clinton’s friends compared the meeting to an international summit at which the agenda and likely outcome are prepared in advance. Although Bill Richardson, a former diplomat and now governor of New Mexico, arrived in Chicago the next day for talks, Obama may have another job in mind for him if Clinton accepts the coveted post of secretary of state.

It will be no easy matter for Clinton to give up her hard-won position of senator for New York, with the independent status and power of political patronage that it confers. Clinton could be senator for life, whereas the post of secretary of state ties her political fortunes to her former rival’s and may last only a few years.

One Clinton supporter pointed to the marginalisation of Colin Powell by President George W Bush as “a sad example of what can go wrong”.

However, friends said she had not fought this hard and long for a public platform to be happy to go back to America’s biggest talking shop when she could bestride the international stage at a critical time. Obama arrives in office in January with an ambitious agenda to withdraw from Iraq, escalate the fight against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and open direct negotiations with Iran on the nuclear issue.

American and Iraqi negotiators agreed this weekend on the draft of a security pact permitting US troops to stay in Iraq for three years after the expiry of their United Nations mandate at the end of this year. Clinton, who initially backed the war, and Obama, who opposed it, support a 16-month timetable for withdrawal but she is likely to prove a flexible negotiator.

Steve Clemons, a foreign policy expert at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, was the first to air rumours last week that Clinton might be offered the job. A member of Hillaryland told him: “Hillary [has] never acquiesced in being a senator for New York for ever. She wants to do something significant and consequential with her life.”

Clinton has often been talked of as a future Senate majority leader or respected “lion” of the Senate, like Edward Kennedy, who plays a critical legislative role on Capitol Hill. But in the Senate, seniority is a matter of length of service and Buggins’s turn. As the junior senator for New York, who has served only eight years, Clinton has no claim to the stardom that she enjoys outside Congress.

Any hopes she may have had of using the Senate as a public policy platform after her narrow defeat by Obama were slapped down when Clinton asked if Kennedy would set up a health subcommittee which she could chair. The answer was no: the ailing Kennedy, who is suffering from a brain tumour, still expects to oversee health himself.

However, before accepting the secretary of state’s job, Clinton would want to consider the extent to which her nomination could subject her husband’s financial and business dealings to unwelcome scrutiny at her Senate confirmation hearing.

Bill Clinton has never released the names of donors to his presidential library, including foreign potentates who could present a conflict of interest. He has also run into trouble for advising Dubai on how to handle its acquisition of American port facilities and has been accused of helping wealthy donors to the Clinton Foundation to drum up business in former Soviet states.

Lanny Davis, a friend of the Clintons, said those fears were overrated: “He has no business interests. That’s a complete myth.” He said the former president’s main concerns were raising money for Aids and tsunami relief.

Bill Clinton’s extensive charity work would receive a big boost from his wife’s appointment as it would give him a new world platform after his hopes of returning to the White House as “first laddie” were dashed. There may also be a deal in the works to help Hillary Clinton pay off her campaign debt of $8m.

The surprise is that Obama seems prepared to share top billing with such a limelight-hogging couple. John Bolton, the arch-conservative former ambassador to the UN, said mischievously: “Obama should remember the rule that you never hire anybody you can’t fire, especially as secretary of state.”

However, the choice of the popular Clinton, who won 18m votes in the Democratic primary, could smooth the path for Obama to keep Robert Gates, the current defence secretary, at the Pentagon, enabling him to fulfil his promise to have a cabinet of all the talents, irrespective of party labels.

Clinton would have to compete for Obama’s ear on foreign policy with Vice-President Joe Biden, former chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, and potential special envoys to troubled regions.

Obama’s model for government may ultimately be based less on Abraham Lincoln and his “team of rivals”, as many commentators have suggested, than on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who led America during the Great Depression and the second world war. He created multiple layers of power with overlapping authority – leaving him to be the decider.

What Team Barack said before

“She is a monster . . . The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive”
- Samantha Power, who resigned as a foreign policy adviser to Obama

“There is no reason to believe she was a key player in foreign policy at any time during the Clinton administration”
- Greg Craig, Obama foreign policy adviser

“Only a commander-in-chief has shouldered that unique burden and you don’t get that kind of experience merely by being married to a commander-in-chief”
- Susan Rice, Obama foreign policy adviser

“What exactly is this foreign policy expertise that she’s claiming?”
- Barack Obama

Times Recommends

• No apology for Germany’s own Nazi victims
• Intricate web of fear and hope tying down deal
• Victims remembered a year after Mumbai attacks