Blair ‘groomed’ me for PM says Charles Clarke

Charles Clarke, the former Home Secretary, has claimed that Tony Blair wanted him to be his successor as leader of the Labour Party, and Prime Minister, and that he had a "longstanding strategy" to prevent Gordon Brown from getting the job.

In an interview in this week's New Statesman, Clarke, who is currently a backbencher having been sacked by his supposed mentor in 2006 over the foreign prisoners scandal, said that Blair wanted to build him up as a credible candidate for the eventual succession by first making him Foreign Secretary.

"Tony told me the day after he sacked me that he [had] wanted to make me Foreign Secretary, and I was staggered ... He had a great plan, apparently... He thought that if I had been Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary I would be a credible opponent to Gordon as the leader of the party.

"And this had been his long-standing strategy, and that was what he had been intending to do, and that's what he hoped to do ... I knew nothing about this until after the event, and I said to him if he was nice enough to think I ought to be leader of the party, then he might as well have been courteous enough to tell me this was his plan."

The revelation is likely to anger Brown, who is keen to draw a veil over his sometimes bitter relations with the former prime minister. And it is a surprising move by Clarke. Despite once describing Brown as a "deluded control freak", in an interview with the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday he said that his criticisms of the PM had at times been a little "intemperate" and he talked of his desire to return to Labour’s front bench. ·