Gordon Brown and Alastair Campbell tearful on TV

What made Labour's hardest men suddenly start crying on TV? Just as the Sunday papers were reporting that Gordon Brown had broken down during an interview with Piers Morgan to be broadcast next Sunday, Alastair Campbell, former spin-meister to Tony Blair, had to take a pause to compose himself when he was pressed about whether Blair had misled MPs over the intelligence ahead of the Iraq war.

Apparently close to tears, Campbell told the BBC's Andrew Marr on Sunday morning: "I've been through a lot on this Andrew. And I've been through a lot of that inquiry... and... Tony Blair, I think, is a totally honourable man."

Pulling himself together, Campbell said: "I'm sorry if I do get upset about this but I was there alongside Tony, I know how that decision weighed on him, I know the care that we took."

The Tories' foreign affairs spokesman William Hague, interviewed later on the Andrew Marr Show, said he was sorry that "Mr Campbell was upset" by the questions but "we are all upset by what happened in Iraq".

Hague went on: "I am upset about the fact that in a debate in which I supported Tony Blair at the time of the Iraq war, we were told that the intelligence was authoritative and extensive and beyond doubt, and it seems listening to the Chilcot Inquiry, that that was not the case."

As for Gordon Brown, he was reported to have broken down in front of a studio audience during the recording last week of the next Piers Morgan's Life Stories, when he spoke about the death of his 10-day-old daughter Jennifer in 2002.

Brown explained that it was he and not his wife, Sarah, who was the first to realise that Jennifer was not going to survive a brain haemorrhage. Sarah Brown, who was present at the interview, also began to cry as her husband went on to say that their three-year-old son, Fraser, may have a "poor life expectancy" because he suffers from cystic fibrosis.

A member of the audience told the Mail on Sunday afterwards: "It was so moving, some us were close to tears as well. It was hard not to be."

The Prime Minister also used the interview to admit that he had had "explosive" rows in Downing Street with Tony Blair and revealed how he proposed to Sarah on a beach. She was, he said, the only woman he had ever loved.