GORDON BROWN:TONY BLAIR claims that his chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, threatened to call for an internal Labour investigation in 2006 into the cash-for-honours controversy, where donors were alleged to have received peerages in return for donations.
Mr Brown, says Mr Blair, said he would call for the inquiry if Mr Blair did not drop his support for a report proposing big reforms of pensions. The affair, he said, “permanently altered” his view of the man who succeeded him.
In a TV interview last night, Mr Blair said Labour lost this year’s election because it had “departed” from the New Labour creed. In the book and the interview, Mr Blair recounts his difficult relationship with Mr Brown, though he said that while Mr Brown’s credentials to be prime minister were “overestimated” when he was chancellor, they were underestimated when he took over at number 10.
He said he had “never been desperate” to be prime minister and had always been “happy to go” after two terms provided the New Labour programme of modernisation and reform was continued, but Mr Brown failed to support him: “The problem was, in the end, we weren’t, really.”
However, he rejected the view that he should have sacked Mr Brown: “At times it was bad. But people often say to me, ‘well, why didn’t you just get rid of him?’ I used to say, ‘that’s why I am the leader . . . and you’re not’. The answer is that in the end his contribution was still immensely important and vital. In the end, even on the reform programme, he put a brake on . . . he didn’t stop it.”