SNP: Brown must answer for cash for honours 'blackmail'
Wednesday, 1 September 2010 12:00 AM
by Peter Wozniak
Gordon Brown ought to answer claims made in Tony Blair's memoir that he effectively blackmailed the former PM, according to the SNP.
MP Angus MacNeil, who began the inquiry into the infamous scandal over 'cash-for-honours' in 2006, demanded a response from Mr Brown over the revelations.
In Mr Blair's book 'A Journey', published on Wednesday, it is suggested that the then-chancellor Mr Brown threatened to damage Mr Blair by calling for a further inquiry into the affair if the former prime minister did not relent on his plans for pensions reform, which Mr Brown opposed.
Mr Blair wrote: "He [Brown] began the conversation not by talking of pensions, but by saying how damaging the loans thing was: that there might have to be an NEC inquiry, and that he might have to call for one. I naturally said that would be incredibly damaging and inflammatory and on no account must he do it.
"The temperature, already well below freezing point, went arctic when he then said: well, it depends on this afternoon's meeting. If I would agree to shelve the Turner proposals, he would not do it. But if I persisted, he would."
Mr MacNeil insisted that Mr Brown, who has until now issued no comment whatsoever about the publication, address the implications made in the book.
He said: "The whole think stinks, and it seems the full truth about Labour's cash-for-honours scandal is still to be fully unravelled.
"Apart from the questions Tony Blair's account raises in respect of the cash-for-honours scandal, it is extraordinarily revealing about the destructive and loathsome relationship between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair."
The revelations will add fuel to the fires of the Blair/Brown saga that have been reignited by the release of Mr Blair's memoirs.
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