Carol Ann Duffy has been offered the post of poet laureate in the past few days but is undecided about whether she will accept it, The Times understands.

Andrew Motion’s ten-year term expires tomorrow, and although bookmakers have stopped taking bets on Duffy to succeed him, there is uncertainty about whether she will actually take up what one commentator described as the “double-edged chalice”.

A Whitehall source confirmed last night that Duffy is the Prime Minister’s choice, adding “it’s down to her to say yes or no”. A separate source, also close to the process, explained that the poet “is still reflecting at the moment. Nothing has been signed.”

Protocol dictates that the preferred candidate is sounded out before being formally offered the £5,000-a-year job by the Queen because subjects are not supposed to refuse a request from the sovereign.

One way or another the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which is overseeing the appointment, expects to announce a new poet laureate either tomorrow or on Friday.

Duffy, a 53-year-old Scot, has been a front-runner throughout the six-month process, along with the Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage. If she accepts, she would become the first woman laureate in the post’s 341-year history. She was the favourite to get the job in 1999 after Ted Hughes died but was passed over, allegedly because Tony Blair felt a lesbian laureate would upset Middle England.

Her place at the heart of GCSE and A-level English literature syllabuses has made her the most widely read living British poet. Equally importantly, she combines a campaigning zeal for the power of poetry with a ready sense of humour: when the AQA examination board ordered the removal of one of her poems from its GCSE anthology last year on the mistaken grounds that it glorified knife crime she responded with a new poem highlighting stabbings in Shakespeare.

Part of her appeal lies in her deceptively accessible use of language. She once said: “I like to use simple words but in a complicated way.”

Hurt by what happened in 1999, she appeared to rule herself out of future consideration for the job, declaring she was “out of the picture” for the laureateship and saying that she would not “write a poem for Edward and Sophie. No self-respecting poet should have to.”

However, Peter Strauss, her agent, said yesterday he had never heard her speak negatively of the role. Rather, she supports anything that “can encourage more people to read, think about and discuss poetry. I told her once, years ago, that she would be a brilliant poet laureate. She just looked at me and smiled,” he said.

Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society, said that Duffy would make an excellent laureate because of her range.

“She can write work that appeals to many different people, not in a lowest common denominator way but because she has so many different registers. There are sunny narrative poems, love poems and her fantastic children’s poems. She is good at dramatic monologues where she thinks her way into the heads of different sorts of people, from Charles Darwin’s wife to a violent teenage boy today.”

Motion’s poetic efforts as Laureate have generally been met with something between polite acknowledgement and outright disdain, and he acknowledges that his painful “rap” for Prince William’s 21st birthday was a low point. Last year he described the job as a “thankless” task.

However, verse lovers will still look fondly on the way that he modernised the post by turning it into a platform for advocating poetry, best demonstrated by his creation of the online Poetry Archive.

Since John Dryden was made the first official poet laureate by Charles II in 1668 there have been 18 holders of the post, including some of the greatest names in English poetry: Wordsworth, Tennyson and Betjeman.

The banned poem

Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets . . .

. . .There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar.
he cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
the pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.

From Education for Leisure

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