Gordon Brown: Getting on with the job

Downing Street has welcomed a move by Gordon Brown to dispel talk of a rift at the heart of government.

Welcoming a denial by the chancellor Gordon Brown that he was at loggerheads with Tony Blair, Number 10 said the move reinforced its claim that the two ministers remained on good terms.

In an interview with the Times on Thursday, Brown strongly rejected any suggestion of tensions between himself and the prime minister over membership of the single currency, the party leadership and spending on public services and tax credits.

"Tony Blair is the best friend I've had in politics. We have worked together for many, many years," he told the Times. "What matters to me is not the office I hold, but what I can achieve in the office I am in."

Although Number 10 knew nothing about the interview prior to its publication, a spokesman said: "The prime minister has many best friends in politics but obviously the chancellor is someone he has worked very, very closely with."

The chancellor also rejected suggestions that he had "lashed out" at other senior Cabinet members, saying spending ministers were doing "brilliant work".

Brown's intervention followed weekend reports that a series of clashes with Blair had left relations between 10 and 11 Downing Street at an "all time low".

"The chancellor is fighting a desperate rearguard action to remain in pole position to succeed the prime minister in a campaign that includes personal attacks on rivals," reported the Sunday Times.

And in a television programme on Saturday former Northern Ireland secretary Mo Mowlam claimed that relations between the prime minister and the chancellor were "crippling" the government.

On the European single currency he denied suggestions that he was cooler about membership than Blair.

"The policy we pursued is the policy we agreed together in 1997. I think if you look at what Tony Blair has said on the euro and what I have said, I do not think there is a word I have said that he would disagree with, nor a word he has said that I would disagree with," said Brown.

And he rejected suggestions there is a choice to be made between tax credits for the less well off and spending on public services.

"The tax credit and public service agenda is part of our economic and social policy working together," he told the paper. "Through tax credits we are taking hundreds of thousands of people out of welfare into work. Over time these people will become taxpayers contributing to the public services. It is fascinating as welfare reform moves from old handout ideas and reforms the tax and benefit system."

He said he was focussing on the "big issues" such as Europe, the economy and the health service, and would not be distracted by the "gossip that surrounds politics".

Brown dismissed Mowlam's comments, attacking "those people who try to relegate huge national issues that everybody understands are big questions for our country into issues of personal ambition, quite frankly I find that offensive".

He also rejected reports that he saw home secretary David Blunkett as "behaving like the worst sort of Tory home secretary", health secretary Alan Milburn as "useless", transport secretary Stephen Byers as behaving "disgracefully" over Railtrack.

"I think Steve Byers has made the right decisions over Railtrack. So that people are absolutely clear, let me say this: I have got the utmost respect for the hard work and brilliant work that our spending ministers - Estelle, Alan, David, Alistair [Darling] and Geoff [Hoon] - all those ministers have done."

The chancellor's new intervention in the long-running issue of relations between the government's two most powerful figures came the day after Tony Blair heaped praise on the chancellor during prime minister's questions in the Commons.

Challenged on the weekend newspaper reports by Conservative MP Sir Teddy Taylor, Blair pointed to an economy doing better than those of its major rivals, saying it was "down to the work done by the chancellor".

"He has done that work better than any Conservative chancellor that anyone can remember," Blair told MPs.