Darling: Blair said working with Brown was like dental treatment without anaesthetic

Darling to attack Gordon Brown as ‘brutal’ and label Bank of England chief Mervyn King ‘exasperating’ in memoirs Alistair Darling will claim in his memoirs that Tony Blair found Gordon Brown so difficult to work with that Blair told him “dealing with GB is like having dental treatment with no anaesthetic”. More details of Darling’s attacks on Brown are contained in fresh leaks of his memoirs to the Guardian. Darling, who was chancellor of the exchequer under Gordon Brown as the financial crisis struck Britain, paints a picture of top officials and his senior colleagues as out of touch, aloof, with the upper echelons of government so dysfunctional one top official is accused of trying to undermine the prime minister. In the book, to be published next week, called Back From the Brink, Darling reveals: • Shouting matches between him and Brown over the need for spending cuts as the United Kingdom’s finances plunged into the red. • That as the banking crisis started, King referred to panicked Northern Rock depositors trying to get their money out, and admitted: “I bitterly regret not thinking of these issues sooner – I should have done so.” • That he found Bank of England governor Mervyn King “impish” as well as “amazingly stubborn and exasperating”. • That Darling’s position became so difficult as he repeatedly clashed with the PM, that his wife joked he was like the Nazi prisoner Rudolph Hess, holed up in a prison on his own. • How a Treasury civil servant attended a meeting where he told Brown that his solutions to the economic crisis were doomed to fail; the mandarin, writes Darling, spent the meeting “languidly peeling an apple with his Swiss army knife”. As well as King and Brown, Darling criticises a host of senior political figures for the economic crisis, and bankers such as Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Fred Goodwin, but it is unclear if the former chancellor will use his memoir to accept any of the blame himself. In earlier leaks , Darling has accused Brown of having a “volcanic temper”, and of presiding over a “fairly brutal regime”, with one top Brown adviser accused of wanting “blood on the carpet, preferably that of her own colleagues”. Describing a shouting match with Brown over the PM’s resistance to spending cuts, Darling says: “Speaking truth to power never came into it.” Blaming Brown for hampering efforts to tackle the economic crisis, Darling claims that Tony Blair told him that “dealing with GB [Gordon Brown] is like having dental treatment with no anaesthetic”. It is arguably one of the most barbed comments to emerge from the Blair-Brown feud that dominated Labour’s time in office from 1997 to its election defeat in 2010. But as well as his boss, Darling says that Nicholas Macpherson, a top Treasury civil servant, held a meeting where Brown was present, while “languidly peeling an apple with his Swiss army knife”. As options were discussed to rescue Britain’s ailing economy, Mcpherson, Darling claims, told Brown his ideas would not work. The former chancellor claims this resistance was part of a row over Brown’s plan to put Sir Gus O’Donnell in charge of the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. Publishers Atlantic Books have denounced earlier leaks that appeared on the Labour Uncut website: “Following recent media speculation about Back from the Brink, the forthcoming memoir by Alistair Darling, Atlantic Books would like to state that the reports of the book’s contents do not fully and fairly represent the author’s views as expressed in the book. “Back from the Brink: 1,000 Days at Number 11, will be published by Atlantic Books on Wednesday 7th September and is strictly embargoed until then.” In earlier leaks Darling told how he resisted Brown’s attempts to demote him, and how the government had wanted to oust King from the Bank of England. Alistair Darling Tony Blair Gordon Brown Labour Politics Vikram Dodd guardian.co.uk

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