BRITAIN:British prime minister Tony Blair insists he will not be forced into an earlier than planned resignation by pressure from the widening police inquiry into the cash-for-honours affair. And he says he will not beg or plead for his character or integrity, notwithstanding his "deep respect for the British people".
However, Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell yesterday urged Mr Blair to enable the people to move on by quitting Number 10 sooner rather than later.
Sir Menzies made his intervention after Labour chairman Hazel Blears, cabinet minister Harriet Harman and former party leader Neil Kinnock admitted that the publicity surrounding the police investigation into whether peerages were traded for secret pre-election loans was having a "corrosive" effect on public trust.
Conservative leader David Cameron has twice urged Mr Blair to resign. And yesterday Sir Menzies said: "This is a prime minister treading water while his cabinet moves on. There is resignation in his voice."
There was no hint of it from Mr Blair when he finally succumbed to an interview with the BBC's Today programme. However, the perception of his declining authority was again underlined by Northern Ireland and Welsh secretary Peter Hain - a candidate for Labour's deputy leadership - who said the controversy strengthened the case for a fully elected House of Lords.
"Given what has happened in recent times and questions about how people are appointed and for what motive, the only way you resolve that is by having a fully elected chamber," Mr Hain told the London Evening Standard.
Mr Hain has retained his position in cabinet despite conspicuously distancing himself from Mr Blair by branding President George Bush's foreign policy a disaster.
His cabinet colleague David Milliband reacted to the week's events - the arrest of Mr Blair's fundraiser Lord Levy for a second time, and the disclosure of Mr Blair's second interview by detectives - citing "a great British tradition that you are innocent until proven guilty" and telling anyone throwing mud to stop.
However, rallying cries for the prime minister were otherwise hard to find as the fears voiced by Lord Kinnock, Ms Blears and Ms Harman fuelled speculation that Mr Blair might yet be forced to leave office ahead of his widely expected June departure.
In his interview with the BBC, however, Mr Blair insisted "it would be particularly wrong" to go before the police inquiry had "run its course and come to any conclusions". Pressed that he could bring the saga to an end by quitting early, and that this might be a service to his party, Mr Blair countered that it would not be "a very democratic way to decide who the prime minister is".
When it was put to him that people no longer considered him, in his own famous words, "a pretty straight kind of guy", Mr Blair replied: "I had the same thing put to me during the course of the last election, when people were calling me a liar and a war criminal. Maybe this is how I have changed over the years as well. I said then, and I would say now, I am not going to beg for my character in front of anyone.
"People can make up their mind about me. But I know what type of person I am."