Granita (restaurant)

Granita was a restaurant in the Islington area of London. It has a certain prominence in British politics, as in late May 1994 it was the setting for a rumoured "deal" between the then shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair and the then shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown.

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It is alleged that, over dinner in this post-modern restaurant, Gordon Brown agreed to support Tony Blair's leadership bid for the Labour Party, following the death on 12 May of John Smith. In turn, it is alleged that Tony Blair would stand down after two terms and make way for Gordon Brown to assume leadership.

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In the leadership contest of June 1994, Tony Blair was elected leader of the Labour Party and led them to victory in the British General Election of 1997 and 2001.

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Since then, however, Tony Blair stood and won a third term as Prime Minister. British media regularly report stories of a rift between Tony Blair and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. In public, Tony Blair denies that such a deal took place, while Gordon Brown refuses to comment on it.

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In 2003, Channel 4 broadcast a dramatisation of the dinner on British Television. In June 2003 the Guardian newspaper obtained a copy of a memo that appears to confirm the truth of a pact between Blair and Brown.http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/story/0,,971669,00.html

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Granita, located at 127 Upper Street, subsequently closed down. A different restaurant is now on the premises.

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Islington: Islington is a district in north London. The area usually referred to as Islington is now only a part of the London Borough of Islington to which it gave its name. Because of its proximity to the City of London, Islington developed as a fashionable area in the nineteenth century, with large well-bu...

British politics: redirect Politics of the United Kingdom...

Deal: In cryptography, DEAL (Data Encryption Algorithm with Larger blocks) is a block cipher derived from the Data Encryption Standard (DES). The design was proposed in a report by Lars Knudsen in 1998, and was submitted to the AES contest by Richard Outerbridge (who notes that Knudsen had presented the d...

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