The Prime Minister We Never Had?

Former Home, and Education Secretary, Charles Clarke MP has claimed the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair wanted to position him to become a leadership rival to Gordon Brown. Astonishingly the MP for Norwich South, in an interview with the New Statesman, says that Blair wanted to offer him the post of Foreign Secretary to make him a more rounded candidate. According to Clarke, the then Prime Minister made this revelation the day after sacking him from the Home Office in 2006 when it emerged that more than 1,000 foreign prisoners had been released without being considered for deportation. Blair, it is claimed, then invited Clarke and his wife to a private dinner at Chequers.

"He had a great plan, apparently, that he wanted me to be foreign secretary because 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. Which ran against, of course, what I had said to him about feeling I needed to do home secretary for three or four years. 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" said the former Home Secretary.

Following his dismissal from Government, Clarke has be a constant thorn in the side of Gordon Brown, criticising his appointment as Prime Minister; setting up a website with Alan Milburn to put out their vision for the Labour Party, and questioning his mental state, claiming he has phycological issues and is a control freak.

Clarke is currently seen as attempting to eye up the position of Transport Secretary but concedes that he'll never run for leader.

Read the New Statesman interview here.
Licence Charles Clarke photographs here.