It’s a damning start for Gordon Brown’s premiership. Has any leading politician been mauled so publicly by his own members a week before becoming Prime Minister?

In tomorrow’s Channel 4 documentary, The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair, former ministers Charles Clarke, Alan Milburn, Estelle Morris and Clare Short, as well as key staff and contacts, speak more frankly than ever on the way the relationship between Tony Blair and his chancellor affected the running of smooth government.

Their stunning revelations include how:

· Staff at No 10 felt like “they were children in a dysfunctional relationship”.

· Treasury officials believed it was “the kiss of death” to cooperate with No 10.

· Blair regretted making a compromise with Brown over foundation hospitals in November, 2003.

· The prime minister did not know on the day of the vote on tuition fees in 2004 if  Brown’s supporters would back him.

· Alan Milburn, his party chairman, regarded Blair’s decision to preannounce his own resignation as “mad”.

· Brown rejected an offer in 2001 to take Britain into the euro in return for the premiership, telling his cabinet colleague Clare Short: “It’s improper and anyway he breaks his word”.

· Blair believed the problem with Alastair Campbell was that “he hated the media”.

Estelle Morris and Charles Clarke give explicit accounts of their experiences of working closely with Brown, revealing how he liked to dominate and take control. Will this man really be a prime minister who listens and works as a team? Just read on and decide for yourself from this  Guardian Unlimited extract:

Morris was education secretary at the start of the dispute over tuition fees, and described how “tension between the two of them” left decision-making impossible because the situation “froze”.

Clarke, her successor at education, said of the chancellor’s methods: “What he [Mr Brown] would do is go along, go along, go along. And then when it came to the point he’d then blast out a very, very full and very technically correct documents at enormous length which he had not shared with us at any point before.

“I had a 25-page letter from Gordon coming through our fax machine the morning I was making a statement to the house with a whole string of changes which he thought were necessary at this very last minute.

“I would categorise Tony’s approach to social entrepreneurship … that is to say to give schools, hospitals, universities the resource to get on with it and do it. Whereas Gordon’s view is much more traditional Labour view. Which means that you can pass a law or make an administrative decision in central government and that will change behaviour.”

On the morning of the vote on education top-up fees in January, 2004, it is claimed that the prime minister did not know if the government would get its legislation through the Commons “because we don’t yet know whether Gordon is going to instruct his supporters to vote for the measure or not”.

Former advisers and ministers admit that the tension between the Treasury and Downing Street was ever-present and affected the way Labour governed.

This is all quite extraordinary, a totally haphazard way of running a country. If all these claims are true, why on earth did Tony Blair go along with Brown for so long? I can’t see Brown turning a blind eye to it happening to him.

And with this uncommunicative background, how does Brown plan to transform himself and his party to a “listening government”, which he has pledged to do?

Pic courtesy of www.englandism.com