When a denial elicits this headline:
“No 10 denies naked Gordon Brown called aide C-word”
What is in and not in Andrew Ranwsley’s new book, which The Observer starts serialising this Sunday, is the talk of Westminster. There’s much speculation about whether the stories that were in the Mail on Sunday a few weeks back—including the one referenced in the headline about Brown sitting on his bed in his underpants on a trip to New York and summoning his aides to berate them for the Obama snubs Brown stories that were appearing in the British press—are the book’s main revelations or not.
The theory doing the rounds at the moment is that Team Brown actually wanted those details out there in an attempt to do a spoiler on the book. Certainly, Charlie Whelan is worried enough about what other stories Rawnsley might have to have started pre-emptively rubbishing it.

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