‘Granita’ deal was agreed weeks before, says Brown

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