Aide reveals Blair wanted to take apart Brown's Treasury empire

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Jonathan Powell told peers how No10 looked "several times" at tearing up Mr Brown's Whitehall empire during Mr Blair's premiership, which was dogged by rows with his Chancellor.

Reports circulated around Westminster two years ago that No10 had considered breaking up the Treasury, which would have been a humiliation for Mr Brown.

Mr Blair's former chief of staff told a parliamentary inquiry that he still believed the Government should "give serious thought" to merging the public spending part of the Treasury with the Cabinet Office in a new Office of Management and the Budget.

A traditional Finance Ministry would be created out of the remainder of the Treasury.

"We looked at this several times in government," he told the Lords constitution committee's inquiry into the centre of government. Sources insisted it was not aimed specifically at clipping Mr Brown's wings. But it would have allowed Mr Blair to gain more control over domestic policy.

Mr Powell also said that Cabinet government had "died a long time ago".

He told the committee: "In my view the Cabinet is not the right body in which to attempt to make difficult decisions. Since at least the late Seventies the Cabinet has been used to ratify decisions rather than to take them."