Brown admits leadership 'deal' with Blair
Updated on 12 February 2010
Gordon Brown admits in public that he struck a deal with Tony Blair over the Labour party leadership - but denies the agreement was made at a north London restaurant.
During a highly personal interview with Piers Morgan for ITV1, the prime minister said Mr Blair agreed to hand over the leadership at a later date, on the basis that he was given a clear run in 1994.
But Mr Brown claimed that the "understanding" was reached before their now-infamous dinner at Granita in Islington, north London.
The "Granita pact" has been the subject of intense speculation ever since. Brown finally succeeded Blair at Downing Street 13 years later in June 2007.
Mr Brown said: "There was no deal struck at Granita's. That's been one of the great myths and people have written about it.
"I'd already agreed with Tony before that dinner that he would stand for the leadership and I would stay on as the shadow chancellor, as the person in charge of economic policy.
"And there's an understanding that at some point Tony would stand down and he would support me if, when that was the case. And that's where we left it."
Mr Brown appeared to suggest that he, rather than Mr Blair, should have assumed the leadership first.
He admitted he felt well-positioned to take over when John Smith died in 1994. He was shadow chancellor at that point and regarded as more senior than Mr Blair, who was shadow home secretary.
He said: "I believed I could do the job, I believed that I'd got the experience and built up the experience to do it."
Mr Brown admitted that there had been "fights" between himself as chancellor and Mr Blair as prime minister during their 10 years in government together.
In the same interview, to be broadcast on Sunday evening on ITV1, Mr Brown wept when he talked of the death of his daughter, Jennifer.
His eyes filled with tears as described the moment he knew that his newborn daughter was not going to survive. She died in 2002 aged 10 days after suffering a brain haemorrhage.
He said: "Nobody actually really told us for a week, it just gradually dawned on us that, that something was going wrong and she wasn't getting bigger, she wasn't growing and, no matter what treatment that was being given to her, she wasn't able to respond to it.
"And I could hold her hand and I could feel that she knew I was there and there was nothing that you could see that was actually wrong, but she just wasn't growing.
"And then probably after a week Sarah and I... she was in the special care. I turned to the doctor and I said 'She's not going to live, is she?'
"And he said 'No, I don't think so. She's not going to live'."
In the interview Gordon Brown also discussed his proposal to his wife Sarah.
Asked if he had got onto bended knee, the prime minister said "no".
Asked what he had said, Mr Brown replied to laughter from the studio audience: "The words were, I want to get married soon, and we should get married soon, please."
