By Michael White

Tony Blair will today go as close as he dares to predicting that the US and Britain will not attack Iraq without the authority of the UN because Saddam Hussein will be exposed sooner or later for flouting the UN's insistence that he give up his illegal weaponry.

As ministers struggle to hold the line against widespread unease among Labour MPs and activists - mirrored in wider public opinion - the prime minister will go on the offensive again as another 62,000 US troops head towards the Gulf and Britain prepares to dispatch Challenger 2 tanks to the region.

Mr Blair will use his monthly press conference at No 10 to insist that he has a "clear strategy" for tackling Iraq and terrorism as well as domestic crime and public service reform. He also plans to explain the progress of the campaign to make Baghdad disgorge what officials insist is its covert arsenal of biological, chemical and, possibly, nuclear weapons.

Yesterday the cabinet's most likely rebel, the international development minister, Clare Short, gave voice to growing ministerial optimism that Mr Blair can steer a principled course through what she called "this historic and dangerous time when the world's feeling so fragile."

Insisting that "it isn't inevitably war", Ms Short told ITV1's Jonathan Dimbleby programme: "I think it's very dangerous, I'm very, very worried. I think all the people of Britain have a duty to keep our country firmly on the UN route, so that we stop the US, maybe, going to war too early, and keep the world united."

Evidently aware that he must take his case to the grassroots, as he did last September, Mr Blair will address Labour backbenchers on Wednesday and thrash out the issues at a special cabinet, probably at Chequers, next Friday. He will visit the UN and George Bush at the end of the month as Hans Blix, head of the UN inspection team, reports his progress to the security council. Mr Blair will also seek to woo critics at Labour's conference in Glasgow next month.

Anti-war activists, who staged another demonstration in London on Saturday, remain sceptical, while arguing that Mr Blair's unique influence in Washington gives him a veto on the war if the US threatens to go it alone.

Whitehall is not as confident as that. But cabinet ministers, several of whom insisted yesterday they are all united behind the Blair strategy, have been assured the weapons inspectors are only now getting into their stride. "We have no doubt that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction which he has managed to conceal from the inspectors. But he will not be able to conceal them forever," said a senior official at No 10.

Yesterday the Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, accused Mr Blair of "wobbling" over his support for Mr Bush.

He insisted: "I'm not in favour of simply following the Americans. I think we have... to make the case for British involvement on British interests, protecting British citizens. My concern is that Labour and the prime minister have not made that case."

His Liberal Democrat counterpart, Charles Kennedy, complained that Mr Blair was not showing enough independent leadership "to reassure people that Britain is not about to go off... on some pre-emptive unilateral action."

A limited newspaper survey of Labour constituency party chairmen showed strong hostility to conflict without UN sanction.

A YouGov poll for ITV today suggests that 53% of the public would back a UN-endorsed attack, but that 32% oppose British involvement under any circumstances and only 13% would support action by the US and UK alone.

With Germany taking over the security council chairmanship, the prime minister flew to Germany for talks with Chancellor Gerhard Schrí¶der, who Whitehall hopes will be keen to rebuild bridges with the US.

The anti-war case was made by George Galloway MP, who dismissed President Saddam as "a broken-down dictator" who is less of a threat to world peace than Mr Bush. "That's why we are saying give the inspectors the time to complete their job. We were told for years that that is what the so-called international community wanted. Now they are doing it, George Bush is pouring troops into the Gulf."

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