By Patrick Wintour
Tony Blair and his aides sanctioned a secret group inside Labour, including the-then Europe minister, Peter Hain, to prepare the ground for a euro referendum during his second term in office.
The group was secret partly to avoid Gordon Brown‘s disapproval, Hain discloses in his autobiography Outside In, to be published on Monday. The episode shows how determined Blair was in 2002 and 2003 to join the euro.