Day I told Sarah: I don’t know if I’ll still be PM this evening

MR Brown told his wife Sarah to prepare for a ‘sudden move’ out of Downing Street as the banking sector teetered on the brink, he reveals today.

The former prime minister said he had been prepared to resign in october 2008 if his £50billion bank rescue plan had failed.

Writing in his memoirs, Mr Brown says he woke up one morning and told his wife that if the scheme had demonstratively failed by the evening, he would have to go.

‘I didn’t know if I’d still be there at the end of the day,’ he says.

Mr Brown announced the biggest nationalisation of modern times on the morning of october 8, 2008. The drastic step – a £50billion state rescue of Britain’s crumbling high street banks – came amid fears that some of the most recognisable names in banking cold have vanished in days.

It led to the Treasury buying stakes in the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and Halifax Bank of Scotland.

In his memoirs, the former prime minister recounts how on the evening of october 7 he met the chief executives of major banks to hear the details of the bank rescue plan.

‘I went to bed at midnight on Tuesday, 7 october, with my mobile phone next to me in case of any further disasters,’ he says.

‘I had decided to announce the plan at 7am the following day, and that we would phone other national leaders and finance ministers immediately beforehand and afterwards.

‘When I got up the next morning I told Sarah that she would have to be ready to pack our things for a sudden move out of Downing Street. If what I was about to do failed, with markets collapsing further and confidence ebbing from Britain, I would have no choice but to resign. As I walked into the office, I didn’t know if I’d still be there at the end of the day.’

RBS was the first bank to sign up, followed by HBoS and then Lloyds, which was taking over HBoS.

But Barclays remained aloof – preferring instead to borrow money from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

‘What Barclays executives and its board now did, to escape British government control, was unconscionable,’ Mr Brown writes.

‘They paid the sovereign funds a service fee – in Qatar’s case, £300million – that they never disclosed. Because of this they have been warned they may well be subject to a Financial Conduct Authority fine for handing over money they did not properly declare. How- ever, the FCA probe had to be temporarily suspended to give way to a Serious Fraud office investigation into a £3billion loan subsequently given by Barclays to Qatar.

‘I was always suspicious of the bank’s lack of openness with their shareholders – and the public – about the deal it did with the Gulf states.

‘And I was always unhappy that Barclays chose to use their deal to make a political statement: denouncing our state recapitalisation of the banks.

‘The fact that it was state money – from Qatar and UAE – that bailed them out did not discourage them from trying to score cheap political points and build a myth about the awfulness of state interventions.’