By Nyta Mann BBC News Online political correspondent

Clare Short soon after her resignation

With Westminster still reverberating from the aftershocks of her resignation, Clare Short has reportedly fled to Ireland.

Labour MPs, however, are still digesting her dramatic exit - including her attack on Tony Blair's style of government and her rallying call for an "elegant succession".

It certainly isn't difficult to find plenty who agree with one or other, even both of these views. But if Ms Short was expecting any great sympathy for her expression of them, she will be sorely disappointed when she returns.

In the words of one ex-minister, "She's attacked how Tony Blair governs, his policies and says he has to go. But what she's succeeded in doing is damage and anger just about everyone except Tony Blair."

In her bumpy departure from the cabinet she has undoubtedly left a trail of collateral damage behind her, much of it to her putative allies.

She didn't say his name but she didn't have to. In calling for an "elegant succession" to the Labour leadership, everybody knew Clare Short was talking about Gordon Brown.

The chancellor was her greatest cabinet ally, and to a degree her protector. He ensured the funding that allowed her the proud claim to have greatly boosted the international development budget since New Labour took office in 1997. There had been a rising expectation that he would have Ms Short as the second half of his leadership ticket, a female John Prescott to Prime Minister Brown.

Her public call for, in effect, the chancellor to replace the prime minister has done Mr Brown no favours. A distancing operation is under way by his camp. "Her support is positively dangerous - no judgement, no self-discipline, no sense of timing," according to a Brown lieutenant.

"She's thrown the spotlight on his loyalty to the prime minister and there's no way Gordon can be seen extending support to her now she's done this."

Though loosely a member of this far from unified beast, Clare Short has long been a controversial figure within it.

Her left-wing reputation and high public profile was certainly an occasional bonus for Mr Blair; she was a licensed rebel he could usefully point to when accused of control freakery.

Yet because Ms Short is widely seen as representative of Labour left wing, other MPs on the organised left of the party see Ms Short's departure, coming as it did after her credibility-sapping U-turn over resigning on the eve of the Iraq war, as adding to the impression of a left that can't get its act together.

"She is at least as dangerous to us as she could ever be to Tony Blair," accuses one leading left-wing MP. "She's always been inconsistent, on the war, on Blair, on policy. And she never once hesitated to do his bidding and attack us when the leadership required."

Tony Blair suffered the biggest rebellion in parliamentary history when 139 of his own MPs voted against war with Iraq.

Ms Short was not one of them but Robin Cook was, resigning as leader of the House to do so. As he said this week, "Had we both gone together it would have had an added impact on backbench opinion."

Other anti-war campaigners are offer a more brutal assessment. Alice Mahon, who way back in February predicted Ms Short's threats to resign over the war itself would come to nothing, believes the minister badly missed her chance. "If she'd only done this three months earlier, just imagine - she would have addressed the biggest political rally ever seen, she could have changed history," says Ms Mahon.

But timing is everything, and Ms Short got her's badly wrong - leaving little prospect of her becoming a focal point for backbench dissent.

"If she envisages leading the left into some kind of opposition to the prime minister, I don't think she'll get the role she's cast for herself," according to Ms Mahon.

"She's her own worst enemy. Her heart wasn't in this war but she was talked round by promises that she'd be a leading figure in the reconstruction. That she believed this really calls into question her judgement, and she just made it easier for Tony Blair to go to war."