Granita, the Islington restaurant where Tony Blair talked Gordon Brown out of running for the party leadership in 1994, has shut down.

Erhan Barut from the company Sofra, which owned Granita, said it had been sold to a property developer for purely financial reasons.

"We had an offer we couldn't refuse and we decided to sell. I know the restaurant has quite a lot of history but for us this was purely a commercial decision," he said.

The Deal, a television drama about the relationship between Blair and Brown, is to be shown on Channel 4 this Sunday.