Sarah Brown: I wish I had spoken out for Gordon

Some wives of political leaders say a little too much for comfort – step forward, Cherie Blair, whose utterances sometimes supplanted her husband's on the front pages. But Sarah Brown wishes she had spoken up for her husband rather more often, it seems.

"When things were going wrong, and I was reading stories about [Gordon] that simply were not true, I wonder whether I should have got more involved — to say: this is just not the case," she told the Mail on Sunday.Gordon Brown's wife – who did speak out on one memorable occasion when she introduced her husband at the Labour Party conference, calling him her 'hero' – is to publish a memoir of her time at 10 Downing Street.

In the book, she describes her time as 'WPM' (Wife of the Prime Minister) as "surreal": and it certainly seems to have been full of bizarre moments of comedy. Perhaps the most memorable is the time president Hamid Karzai told her young son Fraser his lego men looked like Afghans.

Fraser's reaction was to bash the figurines together shouting: "Kill! Kill!"

Other memorable moments include the lofty Michelle Obama's first words to the equally-tall Sarah: "At last, a normal-sized person!" Or the time the Browns spotted Silvio Berlusconi asking supermodel Naomi Campbell for her phone number.

Then there was the Bacon Incident. "Have you made Gordon his breakfast?" asked a civil servant on the telephone one morning. Brown had risen early and was downstairs working, so, naturally, Sarah had not made him his breakfast.

"Don't worry, we'll sort something else out," said the functionary. And so it continued: Gordon broke his fast in the office every morning.

After almost three years in the job, as the family were leaving Downing Street they were startled to be presented with a bill for every breakfast Brown had ever eaten under the auspices of the civil service.

Sarah Brown is a PR woman by trade and the Mail was granted her first major newspaper interview because it has agreed to serialise the memoir.

But it is to be hoped that Sarah sups with a long spoon: the Mail was gleefully involved in the rumour-mongering about her husband's temper which helped to discredit his premiership. ·