Spin queen set to aide Cherie

A close friend of disgraced Labour spin doctor Jo Moore is being lined up as Cherie Blair's new "minder" at Downing Street.

Jo Gibbons, 39, is favourite to take over the tricky post of handling media inquiries about the Prime Minister's wife as part of a newlook No10 team in the autumn.

She will step into the shoes of Fiona Millar, the partner of communications chief Alastair Campbell, who is quitting after six tough years in the job.

A series of disagreements with Mrs Blair's controversial lifestyle guru, Carole Caplin, is thought to have played a role in Ms Millar's decision to quit, precipitating the need to find a replacement.

Ms Gibbons earns £100,000 a year as a director of PR firm Edelman, which she joined after working for former Lords leader Baroness Jay.

She remains close friends with Ms Moore despite the latter's spectacular resignation as special adviser to former trade and industry secretary Stephen Byers after sending out a notorious memo citing September 11 as a "good day" to "bury" bad news.

Ms Moore and Ms Gibbons cut their teeth as Labour officials at the party's Millbank HQ in its mid-Nineties heyday, carving out reputations as hard-nosed operators.

Ms Gibbons, a keen football fan and Spurs season ticket holder, was signed up as a PR chief for England's doomed campaign to host the 2006 World Cup.

But she parted company with the campaign before it ended in failure, returning to the Government to work with Lady Jay.

She developed a feisty reputation, often ringing up journalists and berating them for what she perceived as slights against her boss or criticism of plans to reform the House of Lords.

In the 2001 general election, she was one of the so-called "babes on the bus" - a clutch of top-rated mainly female apparatchiks who kept a rigid grip on Tony Blair's schedule as he toured the country.

She was seen as exercising an equally tight control of the journalists who followed him, working without complaint from dawn to dusk, seven days a week.

At one stage, faced with the prospect of an unexpected day off, she complained to colleagues that she had no idea what to do with herself. "I'll probably just round up the cats, put them in a pen, and tell them to keep quiet and stand still," she said.

At Edelman, Ms Gibbons worked for a company whose clients included Deutsche Bank, lingerie firm Victoria's Secret and GM foods giant Monsanto.

Ms Gibbons' grandparents fled Nazi Germany in the Thirties and her parents are thought to hail from traditional union and Labour Party stock.

She is a graduate in politics and sociology, having studied at the University of East Anglia in the Eighties.

During her time at No 10, Ms Millar encouraged the image of Mrs Blair as an archetypal career woman, striving hard to maintain a balance between her work as a top barrister and the demands of a large family, yet somehow always managing to come out on top.

However, some MPs close to the Blairs felt that Ms Millar believed - even from the early years at No10 - that she was being undermined by Mrs Blair's increasing reliance on Ms Caplin.

This came to a head late last year with "Cheriegate" - a furore which developed after Downing Street first denied, then were forced to confirm, that Mrs Blair had been advised on a Bristol property deal by Ms Caplin's then boyfriend, convicted conman Peter Foster.

Mr Campbell is expected to follow Ms Millar out of the Downing Street door.