Alastair Campbell: Gordon Brown tried to get Blair to quit in 2001

Tony Blair's former director of communications Alastair Campbell has made further revelations about the ex-rime minister's fraught relationship with his chancellor Gordon Brown in the latest extract from his diaries.

Campbell was largely silent on the issue of the Blair/Brown feud in the first - highly redacted - edition of the diaries, published in 2007 shortly after the hand-over of power at No 10.

But last night the former spin doctor revealed that Mr Brown was urging Mr Blair to step down as early as 2001, even before Labour's second landslide general election victory that year.

According to Campbell, Mr Brown never forgave Mr Blair for the so-called Granita deal in 1994, when he supposedly gave the younger man a free run at the Labour leadership in return for a promise that it would eventually be passed on to him.

At the height of the foot-and-mouth crisis in 2001, Campbell records Mr Brown as telling Mr Blair: "You betrayed me. You said you would never challenge me and you took that job away from me."

While Mr Blair regarded Mr Brown's decision not to stand for the succession following John Smith's death as a recognition that he could not win, he said the chancellor saw it as a "noble, selfless act" and nursed a grievance over it.

Mr Campbell also revealed how Mr Blair ("TB") was infuriated by the behaviour of current shadow chancellor Ed Balls, who was then Mr Brown's right-hand man at the Treasury.

"TB … said he had just about had enough of Ed Balls talking to him like something on his shoe," he wrote on 25 April, 2001.

Even before the 2001 election, Mr Brown told Mr Blair that he was "crap" and should stand down, and the then PM told intimates that he had reached the conclusion that his chancellor was working against him.

But Mr Blair said he could not sack Mr Brown, who he regarded as one of the top five politicians of the 20th century.