Brown: “Eff off Tony”

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NEW BLOG! Bring Back Tony Blair - Nov 2007

• “Blair Unbound” serialisation of Seldon & Snowdon’s book at this site
• Go to The Mail On Sunday’s pages
• Blair:”I feel like an abused and bullied wife”
• Bill Jones’ website - contributor to the MoS serialisation on Seldon/Balls/Brown/Blair et al
• Watch BBC interview with Peter Snowdon, “Author”
• The Guardian Cif-ers and Other Such …

Comment at end

27th October,

Telegraph’s Ed Balls Profile

• A few interesting links to sites referencing my post
• SGS Politics blog
• French Cooking
• UK Politics

 

21st October, 2007

BLAIR: “I feel like an abused and bullied wife”

[Pic above: Brown, (thinks): "one day all this will be mine, and YOU will be dead in the water"]

Perhaps not quite as “dead” as he looks in this picture, Mr Brown.

And no wonder Blair felt so abused. It seems his chancellor (the mild-mannered religious man guided in his treatment of others by his churchman father) had a habit of asking Blair when he was going to “f**k off”. Although the language referred to by the author referred to the period after the 2006 local elections, this ghastly behaviour didn’t start then. After Blair had led Labour to a third, unprecedented election victory in 2005, and some say even from Day One - whether that was 1997 or 1994 when Blair clearly ‘won’ the uncontested leadership from Brown - Brown was on his back!

[Pic above right: Jonathan Powell, (thinks) continued ... : "not if WE can help it"]

What a burden. No wonder Mr Blair has aged.

And there is an interesting thought about the ‘loans for honours’ business. Harriet Harmon, the wife of party treasurer Jack Dromey is now pitched high at Brown’s right hand. But there was a suspicion that Dromey, with Brown’s connivance, raised the issue BEFORE the Scottish Nationalist MP who went to the Police, in order, so some suspect, to drop Blair and others in it. And Harmon had never forgiven Blair for dropping her from the cabinet in the early years.

All hearsay, and “allegedly”, but it is an interesting thought. Blair had changed the rules on party funding to make them more transparent; the first time this had ever been done. He used the usual facility for arranging loans instead of donations - the Tories had been doing this for years - and then his own party tried to lynch him for it, allegedly, through the new rules he had just enacted.

What a shower! No wonder I’m disenfranchised.

Note: I don’t expect angelic, mild-mannered bahaviour by anyone in politics where conviction and the stakes are so high, but it IS surprising to hear that most of this language came from Brown (according to Seldon.)

Anthony Seldon’s new biography on Tony Blair - ‘Blair Unbound‘ - makes interesting reading - or should I say, since I haven’t yet read the book - The Sunday Mail’s report of it.

Given that Seldon’s sources are mainly Blairites and/or those ousted or demoted by Brown, some might say it is a little one-sided. And the Mail’s publication of it should be read in the knowledge that this is a Tory paper, bitterly opposed to Labour in all its forms.

And, as last week on Brown’s handling of the election and “bottling it”, Blair may right now be disowning this version of events.

Whether this biography is authorised or not by Mr Blair I have yet to establish. But if Blairites (even possibly the former PM himself) are relaxed about destabilising Brown’s government, there is clearly unimagined personal hatred, resentment and political distrust there. In other words - better that the Tories take over after the next election than that Brown rows back New Labour’s policy changes. Or that such low life as Balls et al should cement themselves in place on the back of the man to whom they owe so much, but to whom they pay such scant respect.

Talk about the power of power!

Still, it’s not beyond the imagination to lend some credence to the reports.

If it is accurate, it is shocking -

1. That some run-of-the-mill politician like Ed Balls (hardly made his mark yet, has he?) should both refer to Blair as a “moron” AND accuse Brown off “bottling it” by not “killing off” Blair after the 2oo6 May local elections is disturbing and should be a warning to Brown.
2. That a sitting British Prime Minister was subjected to unrelenting force since the 2005 election, and perhaps for ALL of his time at the helm, into early resignation. He was never in ALL of that time voted out by the electorate. And yet his successor talks about ‘listening to the people’.
3. That a chancellor became obstructive to his boss to the extent that the then PM was kept out of the loop as regards economic decisions. Brown’s childish silences and moods at cabinet meetings should NEVER have been indulged.
4. That the pretender to the throne should ‘threaten’ the prime minister is shameful.

I could go on …

There is so much in this Mail report that I will paste it all here.

Main article at The Sunday Mail

(You can try to leave a comment there. Since they never publish a ‘Blair Supporter’ like me - I won’t even try.)

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My interpretations of the below:

Blairism is not yet dead, but some fear it will die or re-emerge as Brownism. Blair regrets that he did not demote Brown while he was stronger. Blair is not yet finished with politics, even if some think it has finished with him. Brown and Brownites hate and fear Blair more than they hate or fear the Tories. Blairites feel similarly about Brownites! The Tories are having a laugh!

Excerpts:

‘Tony Blair’s allies were accused of trying to sabotage Gordon Brown’s Government last night after sensational revelations about rows between the two men in a new book written with unprecedented access to Mr Blair’s Downing Street.The book by Britain’s leading political biographer, Dr Anthony Seldon, discloses a series of explosive clashes as Mr Brown plotted to force Mr Blair to resign.

And it gives a revealing insight into the tensions in Mr Brown’s inner circle with a series of venomous disclosures about one of the Prime Minister’s closest allies, Schools Secretary Ed Balls.

The book claims that Mr Blair protested: “I feel like an abused and bullied wife,” after Mr Balls was “astonishingly rude” to him during talks between the camps last year over when he should leave No 10.

According to Dr Seldon, out-spoken Mr Balls also turned his fury on Mr Brown when he refused to step up the pressure on Mr Blair to resign.

The book claims that when Mr Brown returned to his office after failing to trigger a full scale revolt against Mr Blair in a radio interview, Mr Balls reportedly told him: “You bottled it.”

But Mr Brown’s allies fought back last night. Mr Balls “categorically denied” telling Mr Brown he had “bottled it” and sources close to the Prime Minister said Mr Blair’s supporters were guilty of a blatant attempt to use the new book to destabilise the Government.

“Mr Blair’s people cannot accept that they have lost power,” said one. “These stories are a crude attempt to settle scores with no regard to the effect it has on the Government.”

Dr Seldon says the main reason Mr Blair was frustrated at not securing a bigger Commons majority in the 2005 election was because it meant he could not sack Mr Brown.

The book says that Mr Blair railed in private to aides about Mr Brown and the Treasury, saying: “I’m going to take no more s*** from over the road, I’m going to do it.”

More often than not, it is Mr Brown who loses his temper. Seldon says that when Mr Blair put Alan Milburn in charge of Labour’s 2005 election team, Mr Brown shouted: “You’ve appointed that f****** Milburn! Is it about cooking the manifesto against me?”

After another showdown, Mr Blair complained: “All he would say is, ‘When are you going to F-off out of here?”

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And on Seldon’s ‘Brutal Endgame’ page

My interpretation of the below:

Brown is a bottler. Balls is worthy of his name. Blair is a survivor.

On Friday, May 5, 2006, Gordon Brown was scheduled to give an interview on the Today programme on Radio 4.

Tony Blair was weak following a disastrous reshuffle and poor local election results.

Blair had plucked the crown from Brown after John Smith’s death in 1994; here was the Chancellor’s opportunity finally to pull the trigger and claim what he believed was rightfully his.

As one Downing Street aide told me: “Gordon could have killed Tony on that Friday.”

News filtered into No10 of a grid of Brownite sympathisers lined up to go to the media and declare that, at the very least, the bad results indicated that Blair needed to set a date for the handover.

Ed Balls, then Economic Secretary to the Treasury and a dedicated foe of the Prime Minister, was believed to be pulling the strings.

“We’d had a lot of indications that there was an operation being put in place,” says Hilary Armstrong, then Chief Whip. Only its ferocity and manner were unknown.

In front of the Today microphone, at 8.10am, Brown said: “We have got to renew ourselves…it must start now,” and he described the events of the previous two weeks as a “warning shot for the Government”.

In these critical minutes, he had the power to fire the shot that would have finished off a wounded Prime Minister. Brown pulled back. He could not find the words.

No10 learned of Brown’s inner circle going “completely mad” with him for pulling back from the coup de grace, and for not sticking to the script they thought they had agreed with him: to call in the strongest terms for an urgent transition.

Ed Balls reportedly screamed at his boss: “You bottled it!”

Balls loathed Blair, regarding him as “a moron”. His increasingly assertive role at the Treasury struck some as echoing the 1963 film The Servant, in which the butler, played by Dirk Bogarde, progressively takes over as the dominant force from the owner of the house, James Fox.

No 10 agreed that Brown had indeed missed his opportunity.

“They only waited for the ideal moment. ‘I’ve put up with this for a year,’ Gordon said, ‘but no longer.’ We all said, ‘Give him his ten years,’ but Gordon was getting so upset that Tony wasn’t consulting him and that he wasn’t giving him a date.

“Gordon’s great fear was that he would go on until 2008.”

Brown’s camp, says the source, was deeply involved: “They’d been planning something like the coup from day one after the General Election.

He started giving out signals that he was serious about moving the Chancellor, possibly to the Foreign Office.

“I’m going to drive my public service agenda and not let myself be blackmailed or blocked any more by the bloody Treasury,” he would say.

One close aide would often ask Blair, “Are you really up for this?” to which he replied, “I’m going to take no more s*** from over the road, I’m going to do it.”

The Treasury moved into a policy of non-co-operation. “Their attitude was, ‘You’re on your own and you can p*** off,’” says one No10 aide.

Throughout February, Brown came to the General Election strategy group but would sit sullenly, apart from the periodic interjection of a highly critical comment.

One wag dubbed it “the group of death”. Reports began to appear that the Chancellor was sulking.

Eventually Alastair Campbell, who was advising on the Election, visited Brown and persuaded him to rejoin the campaign.

Blair emerged from one meeting with Brown during this period saying: “We didn’t get down to any substance: all he would say is, “When are you going to F off out of here?’”

In a meeting of Blair’s “senior management team” at Chequers on April 13, 2006, the Prime Minister’s future was discussed.

Some pushed Blair to say broadly when he was going to go but the Prime Minister saw the risks of naming a precise date.

“If we were in a rational world, dealing with rational people, the plan would work,” he said. But “if you say July, they will try to get you back to April, then to January.”

However, with regard to Brown, Blair told his team that he had “agreed a date with him which was the summer of 2007.”

Brown also pushed for a period of “joint premiership” in the run-up to the succession.

Brown’s stance was described to the media by the Blair camp, strictly off the record, as “blackmail”.

According to one Blair ally, the meeting broke up with Brown saying: “If you don’t do what I ask, then there’ll be big trouble.”

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GOVERNMENT IN DENIAL OVER BLAIR EU ROLEAnd today to Andrew Marr, Jim Murphy, cabinet minister, when asked if the government was happy with the idea of Blair as EU president, said, “Tony is very busy with the Middle East”.In other words, “No”.Watch your back, Mr Blair.News from the Rugby match: Sadly, England lost. Oh, you knew that already.But did you know that smiley GB/PM & the French President, the ‘Blairite’ Nicolas Sarkozy, held a pre-match summit amid speculation that Mr Blair is set for a spectacular political comeback?Mr Sarkozy is backing the ex-prime minister to become the first permanent president of the EU, a post created by the controversial new constitutional treaty.While No 10 claims to be “relaxed” about Mr Blair taking on the powerful role, in private officials fear he may re-emerge as a political rival to Mr Brown.

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No!? Never. Surely not?

Tags: abused bullied wife, brown, ed balls, miliband, seldon, Tony Blair