TONY BLAIR has claimed he could have carried on in No10 for longer if he had wanted and was “not bothered” by the way Gordon Brown and his allies plotted against him.

In a new television documentary the former prime minister also admits for the first time that he did in fact consider breaking up Brown’s powerbase in the Treasury after the last election.

And in the three-part documentary, which begins next week, Blair also claims credit for the historic decision to make the Bank of England independent — seen as one of new Labour’s most radical first-term decisions.

Much of the film, however, confirms what most MPs and reporters at Westminster have known for a long time: that Blair and Brown were bitter rivals. As Baroness Morgan, Blair’s former director of government relations, says in an interview for the programme of Brown’s Treasury team: “They drove us mad.”

It is the first time that Blair and his aides have spoken out since Brown came to office in June. The Sunday Times revealed last month that Blair has already privately been critical of his successor, confiding that he believed his first Labour conference speech was “empty” and that he lacked vision.

Blair’s office claimed at the time of the revelations that the former prime minister would always be supportive of Brown — although never denying he used those words in private — and even wheeled out old allies such as Tessa Jowell, the demoted Olympics minister, to claim suggestions about Blair’s true private thoughts were “wicked”.

But the new film, including revealing footage of the last exchanges between the rivals in Downing Street, leaves no doubt about the tensions between Blair and Brown.

The programme claims that Brown’s allies plotted against Blair over plans for university top-up fees. It maintains that Ed Balls, Brown’s chief ally, secretly egged on rebel Labour MPs to vote against the then prime minister in an attempt to bring him down.

The Blair Years on the BBC features three interviews with the former prime minister conducted in recent months. Blairite allies have happily co-operated with the documentary, although Brown himself has refused to comment.

Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former press chief, says that the then prime minister refused to sack Brown mainly because it would have left him a rampant maverick on the Labour backbenches.

Blair says in the film: “The relationship between myself and Gordon was different to most prime ministers and chancellors. It’s true there were tensions . . .”

Blair also claims credit for Brown’s announcement on gaining office in 1997 for giving the Bank of England independence.

“Obviously if Gordon had been against it that would have been a different matter altogether, but he wasn’t,” Blair says.

Some MPs believe, however, that Blair was kept in the dark until just a few days before.

The former prime minister was again in the headlines last week for making hundreds of thousands of pounds from speaking engagements.

And it has emerged that the provincial Chinese property company that paid Blair more than £240,000 for a three-hour visit last week has put the former prime minister at the centre of its marketing and reaped an instant windfall of more than £5m from his speech.

Photographs of Blair shaking hands with company executives and inspecting a show house with evident approval were playing in an endless digital display outside the sales office at its newest development yesterday.

The company’s owner, Chen Runguang, 52, is the most powerful property magnate in the industrial sprawl of Dongguan, a city in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.

He rose from obscure origins to multi-millionaire status in the world of southern Chinese property speculation within a decade, forging business links with local Communist party leaders and winning a name for astute financial dealings.

It has emerged in the Chinese media that 100 prospective buyers who attended Blair’s speech at the Hyatt Regency hotel were obliged to pay a “sincerity fee”, or deposit, of more than £66,000 each, a total of £6.6m.

“Blair doesn’t make much sense to me. The cost of his trip will ultimately be loaded onto the price to purchasers like us,” one such buyer, named Liu, told the Southern Metropolis Daily.

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