THE GUARDIAN: World exclusive: As he publishes memoir, ex-PM urges party not to shift to the left
• 'I've got something to say' – exclusive Tony Blair interview
• Blair on Brown: 'Emotional intelligence: zero'
• I didn't see Iraq nightmare coming, says Blair
Tony Blair came to the view that Gordon Brown would be a disaster as prime minister and that Labour could not win the 2010 general election, he reveals in his long awaited memoirs.
"It was never going to work," Blair writes of Brown's three years in No 10, arguing that the former chancellor had "zero emotional intelligence" and fatally abandoned the New Labour formula.
Blair's memoir contains a passionate defence of the war in Iraq and of New Labour's public service and welfare reform plans, which the former prime minister believes his successor abandoned.
Although he refuses directly to endorse any candidate for the Labour leadership, he also makes a number of comments which are likely to be interpreted as criticism of Ed Miliband, vying with his brother David in a contest which reaches a climax as party members receive their ballot papers on Wednesday.
In the book and in his only pre-publication interview, Blair reveals that:
• Brown personally threatened to bring him down over the loans for honours scandal in 2006, before offering to stay his hand in return for the abandonment of Lord Turner's plans to reform pensions.
• He feels intense "anguish" over the lives lost in the Iraq war and failed to "guess the nightmare that unfolded".
• He believes Labour was wrong to ban fox hunting and pass the freedom of information act which is "not practical" for good government.
Blair nails his policy colours to the mast in his memoir by launching a sustained attack on the belief that the financial crisis means that voters want the return of the state as a major economic player. In remarks that will be seen as an implied attack on Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, Blair says voters will not elect a party which fails to offer a credible attack on the deficit. Continue reading and comment >>> Martin Kettle | Tuesday, August 31, 2010
