Brown snubbed Blair pact on euro

Britain's Tony Blair offered to hand over the premiership to Gordon Brown during his second term if his finance minister agreed to adopt the euro currency but Mr Brown rejected the deal, according to a former minister.

Clare Short, international development secretary between 1997 and 2003, told a documentary to be aired today that Mr Blair asked her privately to relay the proposal to Brown.

"'You know, I really wish Gordon would let me join the euro. If he would, I would certainly... I don't want a third term, I would hand over to him,' Mr Blair said to Ms Short on his plane while on a visit to Africa, according to the former minister turned fierce critic of Mr Blair.

"And then I said... 'If you ever want me to say anything to Gordon, please tell me.' And he said: 'I do, I do, I do,'" Ms Short told the BBC documentary "Blair: The Inside Story".

"So I told Gordon and he said the message had been conveyed by two other people and you can't do policy like that. Anyway, there was no guarantee he'd keep his word," she added.

Mr Brown announced in 2003 that Britain had not met his five economic tests for joining the euro, dashing Mr Blair's hopes of placing Britain "at the heart of the European Union".

Mr Blair's spokesman declined to comment on the documentary. Mr Brown is favourite to succeed Tony Blair when the prime minister steps down after a decade in office, probably in July. The last in a three-part series, the programme sheds further light on Blair-Brown tensions. The two men reportedly struck a pact in 1994 - at a north London bistro called Granita - under which Mr Blair agreed to hand over power some time in the future while Mr Brown demanded unfettered control over economic policy and other key areas.

Former minister Peter Mandelson, a close Blair ally, told the documentary there were "tensions and turbulence" between the two as Mr Brown struggled to reconcile himself with the No. 2 role.

"In the end, the prime minister could only do those things that Gordon Brown was prepared to let him do," Stephen Wall, Mr Blair's former chief adviser on Europe, told the documentary. "There are certain areas where Gordon Brown has kind of been hands off - large areas of foreign policy - and others, including the euro, which he's basically said: 'This is my business... This was the deal we did in the Granita restaurant all those years ago,'" Mr Wall added.

The documentary traces the build-up to Mr Blair's announcement in September 2006 that he would stand down within a year. He was forced to outline his plans after a handful of junior ministers, some linked to Mr Brown, resigned after urging Mr Blair to quit.

Some Labour politicians were already angry over the Iraq war and over Mr Blair's unswerving support for US President George W. Bush but Mr Blair's failure to demand an immediate halt to Israel's shelling of Lebanese villages during the July-August 2006 war with Hizbollah guerrillas proved a final straw for many.