Priti Patel is thought to be on her way to Downing Street to learn her fate, after being summoned back from an official visit to Africa by Prime Minister Theresa May.
A Kenya Airways plane believed to be carrying the International Development Secretary touched down at Heathrow at about 3.15pm, amid expectations of her almost certain dismissal from the Government.
Ms Patel had been intending to spend three days in Kenya and Uganda, but was forced to cut short her trip and return home from Nairobi to explain the disclosure of further unauthorised meetings with Israeli politicians.
She has already apologised to the Prime Minister on Monday after failing to disclose a series of 12 meetings with senior Israeli figures during a family holiday in the country in August.
It has since emerged that she then held two additional meetings, one in the UK and one in the US, following her return from Israel.
In a further development, the Israeli Haaretz newspaper reported that during her stay in the country she visited an Israeli military field hospital in the occupied Golan Heights.
Britain, like other members of the international community, has never recognised Israeli control of the area, seized from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War.
There was no immediate comment from the Department for International Development (DfID) on the report.
Downing Street has denied a report in the Jewish Chronicle that Ms Patel told Mrs May in the run-up to the UN General Assembly in September that her meetings in Israel had included talks with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
No 10 also dismissed a claim by the newspaper that the Prime Minister had instructed Ms Patel not to include one of the latest meetings in the list she released on Monday, so as not to embarrass the Foreign Office.
“It is not true that the Prime Minister knew about the International Development Secretary’s meeting with PM Netanyahu before Friday November 3,” a No 10 spokesman said.
“It is equally untrue to say that No 10 asked DfID to remove any meetings from the list they published this week.”
Shortly after the plane landed, TV footage showed a woman who appeared to be Ms Patel getting into the back of an official ministerial car parked alongside, which then drove off in a convoy.
Her return follows the disclosure that she met Israeli public security minister Gilad Erdan in Parliament on September 7, and foreign ministry official Yuval Rotem in New York on September 18.
It is understood that Downing Street was told about the New York breakfast with Mr Rotem when Ms Patel revealed the details of her trip to Israel, but No 10 only learnt on Tuesday about the meeting with Mr Erdan.
No British officials were present and, like her meetings in Israel, she did not report them to the Foreign Office or Government in the usual way.
She was accompanied at all the meetings bar one in Israel by the honorary president of the Conservative Friends of Israel lobbying group, Lord Polak.
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