Gordon Brown was on verge of resignation, admits top aide
By Robert Peston, City Editor
(Filed: 04/07/2004)
telegraph.co.uk
Gordon Brown's closest confidant has divulged how close the Chancellor came to quitting the Government.
Ed Balls, who resigned last week as chief economic adviser to the Treasury to become the Labour parliamentary candidate for Normanton, told The Telegraph that Mr Brown was sorely tempted to take the post of running the International Monetary Fund at the end of 1999.
David Blunkett and Gordon Brown
"A number of finance ministers contacted him to say that they really wanted him to take seriously the idea of moving over," said Mr Balls. "I have to say for me it was a slightly worrying time. But he did take it very seriously. It was something he thought about and talked to me about for some weeks."
Mr Balls said that the Chancellor decided to remain in his post, after speaking to the Prime Minister, because he felt that his work at the Treasury was not completed.
"It was partly that a lot of work had been begun at the Treasury and I don't think he thought it was complete," he said. "But also, it was very delicate, because of the position of the Chancellor."
Asked if it was the Prime Minister who persuaded Mr Brown to stay, Mr Balls replied: "It would be completely wrong of me to start getting into any of that."
Mr Balls's disclosure will fuel speculation that Mr Brown was tempted to go to the IMF, in the autumn of 1999, because of his concern that Mr Blair was indicating at the time that he had no intention of standing down as Prime Minister for the foreseeable future.
There will also be speculation that the Chancellor stayed after being given comfort that the Prime Minister would resign early enough to give Mr Brown the opportunity to succeed him. It is widely believed that when Mr Brown agreed not to run for the Labour leadership in 1994, Mr Blair offered to pass the baton to him during a second Labour government.
Mr Balls refused to give any credence to such suggestions. In a swipe at Derek Scott, the former aide to Blair who, as The Telegraph revealed last week, is about to publish a book about his time in Downing Street, he said: "The idea that at this stage of a Labour Government - the end of a second term when it is about to renew itself for a third term - the idea that people would attempt to destabilise the party by selling memoirs about division and disunity, that's the wrong thing to do."
At the end of 1999, Mr Brown and Mr Blair were through the squalls which had marred their relationship from the end of 1997 and through 1998, which had involved the departures of Mr Brown's closest allies - Charlie Whelan, his spin doctor, and Geoffrey Robinson, the Paymaster General - as well as the resignation of Peter Mandelson as Trade and Industry Secretary.
In the autumn of 1999, Mr Blair gave Mr Mandelson a key role alongside Mr Brown planning Labour's general election strategy, a decision that greatly angered the Chancellor. Mr Brown had masterminded Labour's 1997 landslide and resented Mr Mandelson being given this status.
Mr Brown was minded to take the Washington-based job at the IMF - whose primary role is to prevent global economic crises - because it offered the opportunity for him to pursue his ambitions on the global stage.
"Gordon came to see, after coming to government in 1997, that if you cared - as he does deeply - about issues of debt, poverty and disadvantage in developing countries, and you also care about the ability of developing countries to engage with the developed economies, the managing director of the IMF is a hugely important and influential job," said Mr Balls.
[what a weirdo is our GB ... pb] |
