Sir Nick Scheele, Britain's most respected car executive, is preparing to leave his post as president of Ford after a souring of relations with the group's chairman and chief executive, Bill Ford.
Mr Scheele is expected to offer health issues as a reason for bailing out of America's second biggest motor company - where he has worked for almost 40 years.
The 60-year-old has just had a hip replacement operation, but an exit would be unhelpful for Ford's troubled Jaguar subsidiary, where he was seen as a potential peacemaker by an angry workforce.
Ford insisted yesterday talk of his exit was "mere speculation" but well-placed sources confirmed Mr Scheele was ready to go; he had become disaffected after being pushed into the president's role earlier this year.
With an increasingly competitive global car market, executive acrimony and palace coups have become part and parcel of Ford's history. President and chief executive Jacques Nasser left three years ago amid talk of boardroom splits and the Detroit News commented recently that "Tsarist Russia looks tame by comparison [with Ford]".
Mr Scheele joined the company in 1966 and, after reviving Jaguar in the 90s, was promoted to head of Ford Europe, where he was responsible for a successful restructuring of the wider group. On the strength of this he was promoted by Mr Nasser to group chief operating officer in the summer of 2001.
But Mr Scheele ran into problems two years later amid allegations he had improperly steered Ford's advertising business to the WPP group owned by fellow Briton and personal friend, Sir Martin Sorrell.
Just after an official Ford inquiry got under way, Mr Scheele announced he was reversing the earlier policy of giving all the car company's advertising to WPP. He was also said to have had disputes with the head of international operations, David Thursfield.
The writing was on the wall for Mr Scheele earlier this year, when his chief operating officer post - in effect the number two at Ford - was given to Jim Padilla.
Mr Scheele retained his seat on the board and was given the lofty title of president, but told to look after global products and IT while Mr Thursfield left the company. Company insiders said Mr Scheele has been looking for an escape route ever since, but he is now understood to have made up his mind to go.
His exit will be bad news for Jaguar because the unions were hoping that Mr Scheele could help sort out the problems related to the more than 1,000 job losses and planned closure of the Browns Lane plant in Coventry. Mr Scheele managed the plant between 1992 and 1999 and the chancellor, Gordon Brown, told union leaders at the Labour party conference in September that he would try to make contact with Mr Scheele on their behalf during a ministerial visit to Washington.
Jaguar management will come under new pressure to explain itself on Wednesday, when it appears before a Department of Trade and Industry select committee.
Martin O'Neill, the chairman of that committee, expressed concerns last night that problems elsewhere in the Ford empire might be having an impact on Jaguar in Britain.
He told the Guardian: "There is always anxiety when a flagship part of an operation closes a site.
"Earlier in the year, when they came to see us, they seemed relatively upbeat. It would seem now there is a change in the fortunes of Jaguar, and we want to know why."
Mr O'Neill is becoming concerned about the way in which different parts of the motor manufacturing sector are being managed.
He told the Observer that previous faith in the owners of Birmingham-based MG Rover might have been "misplaced". It followed revelations in this paper that the owners of MG gave their master company a £32.5m dividend, despite MG's deteriorating trading position. The British boss of BMW then described John Towers and other directors of MG as the "unacceptable face of capitalism".
