Memoir: Blair found Brown maddening
Telegraph co.uk.,01.09.10Tony Blair found Gordon Brown "maddening" and blamed the loss of this year's general election on his rival abandoning New Labour principles, according to reports of his memoirs.
But the former prime minister said that it would have been "well nigh impossible" to prevent Mr Brown succeeding him when he stepped down in 2007.
Tony Blair admitted he found Gordon Brown 'difficult, at times maddening'
In his book A Journey, Mr Blair said that sacking Mr Brown would have destabilised his government and could have resulted in him being ousted from Downing Street earlier.
In extracts of the book released to the press, Mr Blair said: "Was he difficult, at times maddening? Yes. But he was also strong, capable and brilliant, and those were qualities for which I never lost respect."
He added: "When it's said that I should have sacked him, or demoted him, this takes no account of the fact that had I done so, the party and the Government would have been severely and immediately destabilised and his ascent to the office of prime minister would probably have been even faster."
Mr Blair said he came to the conclusion that "having him inside and constrained was better than outside and let loose or, worse, becoming the figurehead of a far more damaging force well to the left".
In a message to critics of Mr Brown's time in office, Mr Blair said he was powerless to prevent his successor moving from No 11 to No 10 Downing Street. "It is easy to say now, in the light of his tenure as prime minister, that I should have stopped it; at the time that would have been well nigh impossible."
According to the Daily Telegraph, which has obtained a foreign language copy of the book, Mr Blair suspected his then chancellor of orchestrating the damaging cash-for-honours investigation. Within days of the cash-for-honours scandal erupting in 2006 the paper reports that Mr Blair had a private meeting with Mr Brown to discuss radical pensions reforms drawn up by Lord Turner.
Mr Brown threatened to ensure there was an official Labour investigation into the scandal unless Mr Blair dropped the proposals. Mr Blair refused and within hours, the then Labour Party treasurer Jack Dromey, now an MP, gave a television interview which led to the threatened investigation.
According to the Daily Telegraph report Mr Blair blames the heavy election defeat in May on Mr Brown's failure to stick to New Labour values. Questioning why Labour lost, Mr Blair said: "The response, I fear, is obvious. It won as New Labour. It lost by ceasing to be that."
