Gordon beaten by Sir Francis Drake and a pasty

In it he talks candidly about his discomfort with 'touchy-feely' politics, how he feared he was going blind, and his frustration at allowing the Tories to present the financial crash as a consequence of Labour overspending.

But one tale that did not make the cut may possibly rank as Mr Brown's lowest ebb, certainly during his 32-year stint as a constituency MP.

It was a prolonged battle that saw Sir Francis Drake and Queen Elizabeth I descend on Whitehall, and an enormous Cornish pasty bundled through the gates of Downing Street on a stretcher.

For the details we have to go back to 1992, when Mr Brown was the MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath.

His constituents relied heavily on the nearby Rosyth Dockyard for work, so there was tension in the air when a multi-million pound Ministry of Defence Trident contract to refit Royal Navy submarines was put out to tender.

Some 500 miles south in Plymouth, nerves were also frayed.

The city's sprawling Devonport Dockyards, which employed around 9,000 people at the time, had also submitted a bid.

It meant Britain's last two major dockyards were going head-to-head in what was billed at the time as a fight for survival.

For either site, failure to win the contract could lead to disastrous consequences for jobs in the surrounding areas.

For West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner David Jamieson, who had just been elected as the MP for Plymouth Devonport, it was a challenge he could not afford to lose.

"The stakes could not have been higher," he said. "My dockyard was facing huge cuts in jobs. For a relatively small, stand alone city like Plymouth, there was simply nowhere else for people to go for jobs, so the dockyard was absolutely vital.

"I had just been elected and, particularly as a new Labour MP, I felt I had to make an impact."

It was perhaps this level of sheer desperation that drove Mr Jamieson to employ some truly bizarre lobbying tactics in an effort to convince John Major's government to hand the contract to Devonport.

A massive campaign ensued, which led in the first instance to hundreds of people from the town marching on Whitehall to hand over a petition featuring more than 33,000 signatures.

And as it was reported at the time, the protest 'took on an air of pantomime', with local folks dressed up as historical figures to add weight to the Devonport cause.

Mr Jamieson recalls marching down to Westminster flanked by Devon-born Sir Francis Drake on one side and Queen Elizabeth I in the other.

"There was this story about Drake's drum, which legend has it can summon him to defend England from danger," he said.

"Plymouth was in trouble so we beat Drake's drum all the way to Downing Street."

Then in a surreal turn of events, Mr Jamieson took a six-foot long, 50kg pasty - made by the famous Ivor Dewdney - to the gates of Downing Street on a stretcher.

"It disappeared through the door, to where I have no idea," he said. "John Major probably got terrible indigestion eating the thing."

Unsurprisingly the outlandish parade went down a storm with passers by and the media.

However, Mr Brown was less than impressed. "I think the pasty was the end of any form of relationship between me and Gordon Brown, and we didn't speak much for the 13 years I was in Parliament," Mr Jamieson said.

"I can remember walking into the office building on the corner of Whitehall and I just happened to bump into him.

"We were passing through a doorway and he looked at me and said: 'I've seen what you're doing out there. You're trying too hard'.

"He was cross because understandably he was worried about jobs in his constituency as well. My riposte was that no new MP can ever try too hard on behalf of their constituents.

"I wasn't on his Christmas card list, put it that way."

In early 1993 the Trident contract was awarded to Devonport, securing somewhere in the region of 9,000 jobs on the dockyards and in associated industries that still exist today.

Rosyth Dockyard survived the loss. It was privatised and taken over by Babcock International in 1997, and is still operational today.

Despite their differences, Mr Jamieson says he has a lot of admiration for Mr Brown as a politician.

"He is a man of deeply profound intellect, who has done things for the right reasons," he said.

My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown is out now.