NC: I'm not surprised filmmakers keep going for Blair, and I'm sure they'll keep going back to this period for material. Looking at the Labour government from 1997 to 2010, you'd say that these personalities could not work together. You've got Brown undermining Blair, doing supposedly left-wing things, not because he believes in them but because he thinks it's not what Blair wants him to do. Then you have Brown in power, and to me, more shocking than the bullying, is how nothing gets done. Brown just sits there, like this great spider at the centre of a web, wrapping all his ministers up like flies, and not letting them move or act until he's gone through every detail. Over the whole period — and they have achieved great things — it does look like a very strange way to govern a country.

AR: At the beginning, neither Blair nor Brown would have achieved as much individually as they did together. There was a lot of synergy because they are quite different people: Blair, the master of communication, Brown better at detail, as long as he didn't analyse himself into a paralysis. Brown probably better at rousing the believers and preaching to the choir, Blair better at reaching out to the unconverted. Some senior civil servants told me, that at their best they had complementary skills, and this was how they wiped the Tories, who had been a very hegemonic party, off the map; they were pretty much unstoppable. But as time goes on they just became consumed by this struggle, which has some but not a great deal of ideological content, and much more to do with personal ambition and, particularly, one man's resentment that he is not Prime Minister and somebody else is. As time goes on they become less than the sum of their parts, and they could have achieved more but didn't, because of this battle. 

Brown had a very privileged position in many ways. He had ten years to think about what he'd like to do as Prime Minister, he had a year's notice that there was going to be a vacancy — Blair announced he was off in the autumn before the following June — and he had a smoother transition than most Prime Ministers have. Really interestingly, some hardcore Brownites say that this book is the product of resentful Blairites letting off steam to me, but actually it's not. The most revealing and often startling stuff you get is from talking to people who were very close to the person you're talking about, namely Brown himself. I've talked to people who have been close to Brown for years and one of them said to me that one of the shocks for them was that when he finally got the premiership there didn't appear to be any plan, as you say. As one source says to me in the book, "We had a plan for the transition but we didn't have a plan for government." I think that's partly because Brown had spent so long trying to define himself and position himself within the Labour party as anti-Blair, that he hadn't thought what it would be to be Brown. Then, he never made up his mind as to the extent that his premiership was going to be a rupture with Blair, or a sequel to it. He was torn. 

The Brownites held Blair, I think, in unfair contempt and they always saw him as just totally lightweight, not much more than a breakfast TV presenter — they underestimated Blair. On the other hand, Brown was acutely conscious of Blair's success and as somebody else said to me, all the time there was this voice nagging in Gordon's ear — Tony's voice — saying: "if you want to be successful you've got to be like me". Brown never got his own head around how much he was a sequel to Blair or a change or a renewal, and he was basically crippled by that for the first year of his premiership. He was actually somewhat rescued when the financial crisis hit and he latched on to that to give himself a sense of purpose.

NC: It seems odd that he's been rescued by that, and I agree to an extent that he has been. But I was stunned by your account of him going into the Treasury, when he doesn't have what sensible Tories who know how finance works and all Social Democrats used to have — that is, some idea that high finance and the banks, if left to their own devices, can run riot and bring the roof down. It seems to me from your account — and I'm sure it's true if we go back and think about what he did — that by 1997 he'd lost his wary instincts. As the boom goes on and on and on, as is the normal way in bubbles, he starts thinking it will be different this time, it will be OK. He was like that right from the start.