Brown v Blair: a comedy

First the tragedy, then the farce: if there was something dark, perhaps shocking, about last weekend’s bullying allegations, then the latest Rawnsley revelations veer towards the hilarious.  They’re centred around Brown’s efforts to oust Tony Blair, and the Guardian covers them here.  I won’t pre-empt your enjoyment of them, except to highlight this passage from the report:

“Rawnsley reveals that Brown rang Blair while he was staying with the Queen at Balmoral. He was furious that Alan Milburn, Blair’s close ally, had written a piece supporting the prime minister’s right to stay at No 10.

Rawnsley writes:

‘The chancellor’s fury was titanically demented even by his standards. ‘You put fucking Milburn up to it,’ Brown raged down the phone. ‘This is factionalism! This is Trotskyism! It’s fucking Trotskyism!’ Blair was nonplussed. He had not even seen the article. After the call, he then read it and phoned Milburn to say it was excellent.