The Times reports that Tony Blair will anoint Gordon Brown as his successor today in a bid to shift attention away from the Iraq issue.

The Labour leader told the paper Brown would make an excellent prime minister.

And the Times also discloses that Blair is about to create 16 Labour peers, making his party the largest group in the Lords for the first time in history with a total of 218.

The dissolution honours list, to be published tomorrow, creates five Tory peers, taking Michael Howard's group in the Lords to 208. The Liberal Democrats will get five.