Gordon Brown 'feared he might go blind' when he was prime minister

Gordon Brown has described for the first time the dramatic moment he feared he would go blind when he was prime minister.

He was already blind in one eye and suffered a loss of vision in the other after a blow to the head in a rugby match as a teenager.

The sudden deterioration in his sight happened in 2009 and was reported at the time, but Downing Street sources described it then as "no big deal".

It came at a low point in Mr Brown's premiership, after a failed coup against him by Labour plotters and amid speculation about his health and his failing eyesight.

Now, in an extract from his memoir, My Life, Our Time, Mr Brown has candidly revealed what happened and how he planned for eye surgery.

"When I woke up in Downing Street one Monday in September (2009), I knew something was very wrong. My vision was foggy," he wrote.

"That morning, I was to visit the City Academy in Hackney to speak about our education reform agenda.

"I kept the engagement, doing all I could to disguise the fact that I could see very little - discarding the prepared notes and speaking extemporaneously."

As soon as the event was over, Mr Brown was driven to the consulting room of a prominent surgeon at the Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.

"To my shock, in examining my right eye, he discovered that the retina was torn in two places and said that an operation was urgently needed. He generously agreed to operate that Sunday," he wrote.

On his way out, Mr Brown asked if an old friend, Hector Chawla, who had treated him in the past, could be invited to give a second opinion.

He saw him the day the operation was due to take place.

"I was already prepared for surgery when he examined me and said he was convinced that the tears had not happened in the past few days. They were not new but longstanding," Mr Brown wrote.

"His advice was blunt. There was no point in operating unless the sight deteriorated further. Laser surgery in my case was more of a risk than it was worth."

Mr Brown - who kept the new eyesight problems a closely guarded secret at the time - said he feels "lucky beyond words" that the retina has continued to hold.

"Even if I felt fate had dealt me a hand I would not have chosen, my time in and out of hospital - and the fight for my eyesight - gave me a perspective that I still feel helps me to be more understanding of difficulties facing others in
a far worse position than me," he wrote.

In his book, Mr Brown also admits he struggled to communicate with voters in an era of "touchy feely" politics and Twitter.

"During my time as an MP I never mastered the capacity to leave a good impression or sculpt my public image in 140 characters," he writes.

"In a far more touchy-feely era, our leaders speak of public issues in intensely personal ways and assume they can win votes simply by telling their electors that they 'feel their pain'.

"I fully understand that in a media-conscious age every politician has to lighten up to get a message across and I accept that, in the second decade of the 21st century, a sense of personal reserve can limit the appeal and rapport of a leader.

"I am not, I hope, remote, off-hand or uncommunicative. But if I wasn't an ideal fit for an age when the personal side of politics had come to the fore, I hope people will come to understand this was not an aloofness or detachment or, I hope, insensitivity or a lack of emotional intelligence on my part.

"Really, to my mind, what mattered was not what I said about myself, but simply what our government could do for our country."

While he helped to secure a worldwide recovery plan following the crash, Mr Brown said his inability to communicate more effectively meant he was unable to persuade voters to back his vision of the way forward.

"My own biggest regret was that in the greatest peacetime challenge - a catastrophic global recession - I could not persuade the British people that the progressive policies I pushed for, nationally and internationally, were the right and fairest way to respond," he writes.

"We won the battle - to escape recession. But we lost the war - to build something better. I fell short in communicating my ideas. I failed to rally the nation around the necessary fiscal stimulus and my plans for radical change."

:: My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown is out on 7 November .