I have only just got to page 227 of Jonathan Powell’s The New Machiavelli, which seems to contain the smoking gun: the evidence that links Gordon Brown to the attempt to bring Tony Blair down by exploiting the false allegations of loans for peerages in 2006.
Blair, in his own book (p608), says of his account of what happened on 15 March that “I have considered at length whether or not to include this episode”. He and Brown were due to have a three-way meeting about the Turner report on pensions with John Hutton, Work and Pensions Secretary, that afternoon; to prepare for which Blair and Brown met alone in the morning:
It was the ugliest meeting we ever had … What he proceeded to say in that meeting stunned me. He began the conversation not by talking of pensions, but by saying how damaging the loans thing was; that there might have to be an NEC [National Executive Committee of the Labour Party] inquiry; and he might have to call for one. I naturally said that would be incredibly damaging and inflammatory and on no account must he do it …
He then said: Well, it depends on this afternoon’s meeting. If I would agree to shelve the Turner proposals, he would not do it. But if I persisted, he would …
It was not pleasant and there were things said that should remain in the privacy of that room and our recollection. Suffice to say … he made a threat; I disdained it.
We then had the pensions meeting with John Hutton at four, in which I insisted the Turner proposals proceed. It ended around five. At six Jack Dromey [Labour Party Treasurer and husband of Harriet Harman] made his statement calling for an inquiry. I really don’t know for a fact that Gordon put Jack up to it. Gordon denied ever speaking to him.
Dromey himself has always denied acting in concert with Brown, or that he hoped to hasten Brown’s succession by going on television to denounce the loans. But now Powell says this:
The next day John Prescott told Tony that Jack Dromey had said he had been told to make the statement by Number 11. John added that Gordon had tried to persuade him to join the call for an inquiry as well, but he had refused.
Brown is lucky that the full extent of his disloyalty has emerged only gradually and only after he ceased to be prime minister – in successive books by Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair, Steve Richards and now Jonathan Powell.
The majority of Labour Party members who recognise that on balance Blair was quite a good prime minister (that is, the 54 per cent who voted for David Miliband) have every right to be angry that Brown took power by what Blair called “Mafia-style politics” without the slightest idea of what he wanted to do with it.
(The passage about John Prescott and Jack Dromey was in the Observer serialisation of Powell’s book on 10 October, but I didn’t notice it then.)
Eagle Eye 