Blair tried to sack Brown in ’05

Outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair tried to sack his successor Gordon Brown and break up the ministry he was heading just after the country’s 2005 general election, a media report said on Sunday.

A confidential document prepared two years ago by a trusted team of advisers in the prime minister’s “Strategy Unit” showed Blair planned to “scupper Brown’s career and break up the Treasury,” The Independent reported. Blair intended to move Brown to another post to loosen his control over the domestic agenda, according to the document, which also included a briefing for a “new Chancellor”, the report said.

So bitter was the relationship between the two in 2004 that the Chancellor’s patience once snapped and he told Blair, “There is nothing you could say to me now that I would ever believe,” the report said.