Enlarge imageBy Madeline Chambers
LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair has denied he offered to resign before the next election as media reports about a rift with his finance minister Gordon Brown intensified.
Just four months before an expected election, strained relations between Britain’s two most powerful men dominate the headlines and are sidelining Blair’s efforts to focus on policy.
The Sunday Telegraph reported that Brown, the man most observers expect to succeed Blair, said he would never believe the prime minister again as he had reneged on a promise to quit.
"There is nothing that you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe," Brown is quoted as saying to Blair.
A new book by the newspaper’s City Editor Robert Peston claims Blair told Brown over a year ago that he had lost the trust of the electorate over the Iraq war and would stand down before the next election, now expected in May or June.
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The serialisation is the latest in a string of reports in the last decade about the tetchy relations between the two men whom most observers view as political rivals.
But Blair said he had done no deals with Brown.
"You don’t do deals over jobs like this," Blair said on BBC TV’s Breakfast with Frost. "What both of us are actually concentrating on are the issues that concern the country."
Blair repeated he intended to serve a full third term but would stand down before a fourth election.
The latest newspaper story grabbed headlines just three days after tensions resurfaced over the timing of Blair’s monthly news conference which clashed with a major speech by Brown.
Brown declined to comment on the report.
"We will not be distracted from the shared purpose, the unity that is imperative in this government and this country with the problems that lie ahead," Brown told BBC TV.
Blair and Brown together transformed the party in the mid 1990s to make it electable after 18 years in opposition.
RIDICULE
Although the spectacle still poses no threat to the historic third Labour victory pollsters expect, it detracts from Blair’s efforts to grasp the initiative after two years of being dogged by the Iraq war, unpopular among many voters.
And it risks angering Labour parliamentarians, many of whom opposed Blair over Iraq, by exposing the government to ridicule.
Conservative leader Michael Howard called them "squabbling schoolboys" and said the rivalry was "deeply damaging".
"This is the politics of the playground and Britain really does deserve better," Howard told Sky TV.
But Howard’s party is lagging. An ICM poll for the News of the World showed Labour ahead of the Conservatives by 38 percent to 31 percent.
Blair’s decision last year to put an old ally, Alan Milburn, in charge of election strategy -- previously Brown’s territory -- is said to have angered the Scot who has more grassroots support in the party.
The rivalry originated in 1994 when, according to Westminster myth, Blair promised to one day step aside in Brown’s favour in return for a free run at Labour’s leadership.
