BRITAIN: The PM's remarks in Australia caused a tremor back home, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
"If the going gets tough, we tough it out." Addressing the Australian parliament yesterday, British prime minister Tony Blair was talking about Iraq and the ongoing "war" on international terror.
In the inner sanctum at 11 Downing Street, however, there may have been a tremor of suspicion that uppermost in Blair's mind were matters closer to home - specifically those arising from his now-admitted "mistake" of announcing he would stand down before the next election.
The recent relative peace between the occupants of Numbers 11 and 10 evidently derives from chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown's assurance that not even Tony Blair could contemplate a U-turn so spectacular as to renege on his promise to the British people and seek a fourth term after all.
That may have been the sanguine view of the Brownites on Sunday, after scanning the first excitable accounts of Blair's interview in which he was asked if it had been "a strategic mistake" to pre-announce his intentions before last year's election.
And indeed again yesterday as Blair aides explained the prime minister had been cut-off mid-sentence, and had in fact only intended to say it had been a mistake to think announcing his intentions would end speculation about his future.
Moreover, that may be the simple truth of it - an admittedly novel concept for some, offered yesterday by one Labour man who thinks Blair totally "amoral" and yearns for his departure.
"I think what happens when you get into your third term . . . is that it really doesn't matter what you say, you are going to get people saying it should be time for a change, or when are you going or who's taking over?" Blair told his interviewer: "You just get on with the job because this speculation, I think, would happen whatever decision you take. Now it was an unusual thing for me to say but people kept asking me the question, so I decided to answer it. Maybe that was a mistake." And of course it was a huge mistake, as many told Blair at the time.
Yet, as Jackie Ashley observed in yesterday's Guardian, Blair's explanation for it doesn't quite hang together. He was under no great pressure to say what he did when he did, save for speculation about his health and his investment in a London property. The impression has endured that he thought to buy time and kill off immediately threatening headlines, and subsequently came to regret ruling out a fourth term.
A reminder of this came with his bravura performance on the Parkinson show, when he looked for all the world as if he might be running for a first term in office.
While unusually giving him the benefit of the doubt on this occasion, our Labour man acknowledges one should not discount the possibility that Blair's message is that he does indeed intend to "go on and on". Anything is possible, he reasons, from a New Labour camp which unashamedly suggests, as Lord Falconer did yesterday, that there is no connection between the loans scandal and Blair's new interest in a largely elected House of Lords. However, the man the Labour movement will be waiting to hear from next is Mr Brown.
Yesterday's was the second of three big speeches intended to implant Blair's pro-US interventionist foreign policy as part of his legacy.
He warned about the "madness" of European hostility to the US, insisting it was vital it remained engaged in world affairs. "I do not always agree with the US. Sometimes they can be difficult friends to have," he told the House of Representatives.