New book reveals how Ministers out for revenge turned against Gordon Brown

LONDON - Britain’s Shadow Deputy Prime Minister Harriet Harman had played a pivotal role in an attempted coup against former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a new book has revealed.

According to the Daily Mail, the revelations in the book ‘Brown At 10′ by political historians Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge raise major questions about the loyalty of the woman who is the Deputy Leader and Party Chair of the Labour Party since June 2007.

The book reveals that Harman had hatched the plot when she gathered conspirators for a New Year’s Eve dinner at her Suffolk home.

Those present at the dinner included former Secretary of State for Health Patricia Hewitt, former Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon and at least two other senior Labour MPs, who all agreed that Brown had to go if Labour was to avoid defeat.

One of the guests claims that Harman made it clear that “something had to be done” and that she was “willing to confront Brown herself”.

“The consensus was that, for the sake of our party, we needed to change the leader, and this was our last chance of doing it,” the guest said.

Another plotter mentioned that Hoon was preparing to write a rallying article that would criticise Brown’s leadership.

In Hoon’s view, the Prime Minister was leading Labour towards electoral disaster.

Like some of the other plotters, he was also motivated by a personal grudge, as he had been demoted from the Cabinet in the June 2009 reshuffle.

The same went for Harman, who believed that Brown had consistently failed to give her the trust and respect that she deserved in her elevated position.

Others known to be unhappy with Brown were the Justice Secretary Jack Straw, Alistair Darling and Home Secretary Alan Johnson.

However, Brown survived because the forces of inertia were far stronger than the forces of revolution, the report said.

Meanwhile, Harman, who has since been accused by one of the plotters of having “bottled it”, declined to comment on the details.

Harman’s spokeswoman however insisted that the Shadow Deputy Prime Minister had been a “loyal deputy to Gordon Brown”.

“She knew that there was discontent, she had a longstanding friendship with Patricia, but to describe her as the guiding hand of the coup would be wrong,” the spokeswoman said. (ANI)