Brown plays down Granita talks with Blair

labour: Restaurant meeting merely rubber-stamped earlier negotiations

Gordon Brown has said the supposed crunch talks at a restaurant with Tony Blair over the leadership of the Labour Party was just a rubberstamping exercise.

The former Prime Minister and chancellor said “The Deal” widely believed to have been struck in Granita was the result of negotiations which had been worked through weeks before.

Writing in his latest book My Life, Our Times, to be released tomorrow, he details the arrangements and how his brother Andrew had recorded the sequence of events in his diary.

Mr Brown said: “I always smile when commentators write that we hammered out a deal in the restaurant.

“The Granita discussion merely confirmed what he had already offered and I had already agreed.

“The only new point was Tony’s overture that he wanted to show that, unlike the Tories under Mrs Thatcher, Labour was not a one-person band but a partnership.

“As we walked out of the restaurant towards his home, he emphasised the word ‘partnership’ again and again, telling me it represented a new departure for British politics.”

The pact made in 1994 is said to have meant Mr Blair would step aside during his second term so he could focus on family life.

Mr Brown was to take control of social and economic policy while serving as chancellor.

His brother’s diary includes extracts which say Mr Blair described the thenshadow chancellor as the “greatest political mind the Labour Party has had”.

Mr Brown said: “I would accept his assurances. He would give me control of economic and social policy and would stand down during a second term.

“Unwilling to see the party divided in a way that would endanger the prospects for reform, in the days leading up to May 30 I informed those closest to me of my intention not to stand.

“The rest was a formality. On May 31, I sat down again with Tony near his home in London, at a restaurant called Granita.”

However, he claims the relationship got off to a bad start following the meeting. He added: “When I offered to chair Tony’s leadership campaign, he demurred. And while I helped write his leadership speeches, I was frozen out of the campaign.

“Long into the future, the focus of the 1994 leadership race would wrongly remain on what was said at Granita.

“The restaurant did not survive and ultimately neither did our agreement.”

Picture: PA. Gordon Brown said his relationship with Tony Blair got off to a bad start after the 1994 meeting.