Gordon Brown has been attacked by a former special adviser for his stressful working practises.
The revelations by John Woodcock, a former special adviser to the last PM and now an Labour MP - provide further insight into the tensions at the heart of No. 10 during Brown's premiership:
“You are trying to maintain your forward focus and strategic grip on the things you want to do for the British people, [and] at the same time things are just constantly coming at you day after day," he told The House magazine.
"The setup in there at the time, and Gordon’s way of working, was not always conducive to the longer-term approach, and there was always a tension.
"We were moved in at the beginning to the ‘war room’, this open plan office, and we had Sky and News 24 on the big screens, and there could be a tendency sometimes to get sucked into that immediate level of rebuttal where people needed to be keeping their eye on the longer-term strategic objectives.”
Woodcock, elected in 2010 as an MP, told the parliamentary magazine that the new generation of politicians must "not slip subconsciously into the mentality which says what we need to be focusing on over these first few years, maybe this first term, is finding our feet and working out how to do things, and effectively leaving the job of working out how to get back into government to someone else.
"Consciously no-one thinks that, but we must not allow ourselves to.”