Is this where the Blair deal was done?

In his new biography, John Burton, Mr Blair's agent in Sedgefield, reveals that there was a secret meeting between the two men a fortnight before their famed rendezvous at a London restaurant.

The deal between Mr Blair and his chancellor is one of the most intriguing questions surrounding the most powerful partnership in Britain. It has so fascinated political commentators that only last month a television drama was devoted to the tense meeting between the two men at the Granita restaurant in Islington.

It has long been assumed that at Granita on May 31, 1994, Mr Brown, the senior member of the partnership, agreed to stand aside to allow Mr Blair, the more telegenic of the pair, an easier run at the leadership - on the proviso that Mr Blair would one day stand down to allow Mr Brown to become Prime Minister.

But Mr Burton remembers that several days after the death of Labour leader John Smith, with the media clamouring to know which moderniser would stand, the pair met at Durham County Hall.

Mr Brown arrived at the back from the railway station and Mr Burton drove Mr Blair up to the front.

"I just left him," says Mr Burton in the book, The Grit in the Oyster. "It wasn't my place to be in on that."

They met in the suite of the chief executive, Kingsley Smith. "He still says he was kicked out of his office as a little bit of history was made," says Mr Burton.

The pair amicably agreed that whoever was in front in the polls in a fortnight's time would take on the moderniser's mantle. By this version of events, the Granita meeting, with Mr Blair well in front, merely rubber-stamped what had been agreed secretly in Durham.

* The Grit in the Oyster: The Biography of John Burton by Keith Proud is published later this week by The Northern Echo. It will be available from the Echo bookshop on 0800-0150552, newsagents and bookshops.