Click here for extracts one, two, three and four

Alastair Campbell said today that he had deliberately removed references to Gordon Brown from his insider diaries of his time as Tony Blair’s chief media adviser.

The former No 10 spindoctor insisted that he had not been ordered by party grandees to remove references to the new Prime Minister - who yesterday indicated he was not interested in reading the account.

He had done so voluntarily to protect the Government, he said, and to stop Tory leader David Cameron thinking he had “a gold mine to use again at the new Labour Prime Minister”.

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“I’m not going to deny there weren’t times when relations were pretty tense and some pretty harsh things were said, they were,” he added today, in an interview with the BBC.

The four pages of diary extracts which were published today on his website provide teasing insights from some of the key moments in the Blair premiership, including a blazing row with Bill Clinton over Kosovo, and what Martin McGuinness said the first time that the Sinn Fein leaders set foot in Downing Street.

Today’s extracts - a fuller, although still not definitive, version of the diaries is to be published in book form tomorrow - also give a flavour of the tensions within the Cabinet in the run-up to the crucial vote on the Iraq war, as well as negotiations with President Bush.

After Mr Bush was persuaded after talks with Mr Blair to seek another UN Resolution before invading, despite opposition from his vice-president Dick Cheney, Mr Campbell writes that the President joked to him that: “I suppose you can tell the story of how Tony flew in and pulled the crazed unilateralist back from the brink”.

Mr Campbell’s selection also includes a key meeting in the negotiations over the Northern Ireland peace process, noting how a shocked silence fell as Mr McGuinness said on entering the Cabinet room: "So this is the room where all the damage was done."

The Downing St team assumed that he was referring to the IRA's mortar attack on John Major less than a decade before, but in fact, writes Campbell, Mr McGuinness was talking about the place where generations of British policy-making on Ireland was carried out.

"'No, no, I meant 1921 (the date that Britain recognised the south of Ireland as the Irish Free State, splitting the country in two),' he said," reports Campbell.

At the same meeting Mr Blair asked Sinn Fein leaders at Downing Street “whether they would be able to sign up to a settlement that did not explicitly commit to a united Ireland”.

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