Rawnsley: Blairs ‘taunted’ Brown after baby’s death

Gordon Brown thought Tony Blair was taunting him after the death of his newborn baby Jennifer by leaving his son Leo's pram in full view, according to political journalist Andrew Rawnsley, whose new book, The End of the Party, was finally published yesterday.
 
Rawnsley also claims Brown's wife Sarah is an accomplished political spin doctor in her own right, whose nickname among the prime minister's staff is 'Magda Goebbels', after the wife of Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph.
 
Sarah, the prime minister's "best and chief propagandist" according to Downing Street officials, is said to have struck up a "strong, and to some at No 10 surprising, alliance" with Charlie Whelan and Damian McBride, the prime minister's top spin doctors.
 
McBride was later forced out of his job after his scheme to target senior Tories with a smear campaign was uncovered. But before that scandal, it is claimed Sarah, who ran her own PR firm until 2001, allowed McBride to hold a private lunch at Chequers, the prime minister's official country home.
 
As for Rawnsley's further allegations of friction between Brown and then prime minister Tony Blair, he claims that in the wake of the death of Gordon and Sarah's newborn daughter Jennifer in 2002, Brown is said to have told a colleague: "Tony and Cherie are so cruel to me."

Rawnsley explains: "The Blairs lived in the flat above No 11. They would leave little Leo's pram parked outside the flat door, where it was visible to the Browns. Brown would continue to rage about the Blairs' 'cruel treatment' of him and his wife, bringing it up with one minister a full five years later."

There's that word "rage" again. But the view in Westminster – supported by recent opinion polls - is that Rawnsley's stories of anger and even bullying, drip-fed to the public through serialisation in the Observer, have not harmed the PM.

Nevertheless, Number 10 still felt it necessary to issue the now-traditional denial of Rawnsley's claims, telling the Daily Mail: "Over the last two weeks all these spurious and malicious allegations have unravelled one by one and been shown to be untrue." ·