BRITAIN: Mr Tony Blair asserted his authority over Mr Gordon Brown yesterday when he flatly denied that the chancellor had ever told him "there is nothing you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe". At the same time, the prime minister declined a challenge from the Conservative leader, Mr Michael Howard, to say whether he had told the chancellor that he would stand down in his favour before the general election.
Mr Blair's reported decision to renege on that commitment is said to have triggered the breakdown in his relationship with Mr Brown and to have sparked the damning quote attributed to the chancellor in the book Brown's Britain.
However, having watched Mr Brown decline repeated opportunities to deny or disown the damaging quote at media events since Sunday, Mr Blair took the opportunity of the chancellor's absence in Africa yesterday to deny it for him on the floor of the House of Commons.
Government sources confirmed that the decision to do so had been taken in anticipation of Mr Howard's attempt to exploit the issue yesterday during the first Prime Minister's Questions of the year. Labour MPs groaned loudly when Mr Howard opened fire by asking Mr Blair: "When the chancellor told you 'there is nothing you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe', how did you reply?"
Mr Blair hit back with his flat denial. "It doesn't arise, since he (Mr Brown) didn't say that to me," declared Mr Blair. "So the claim in the book happens to be wrong."
However, Mr Howard was undeterred as the Conservative Party launched the first in a series of poster campaigns which will seek to make the rivalry between Mr Blair and his would-be successor a dominant election issue. And the Conservative leader landed a blow when he twice challenged Mr Blair to say whether he had in fact signalled his intention to stand down and make way for Mr Brown prior to last year's local and European elections.
Declining to say whether he had offered to quit, Mr Blair instead repeated his previous formula, insisting: "I have already explained why no one does deals over a job like this." However, Mr Howard persisted, claiming that Mr Blair had first done such a deal during his famous Granita Restaurant meal with Mr Brown following the death of Mr John Smith, and then last year over supper at Deputy Prime Minister Mr John Prescott's Admiralty Arch apartment.
"He's the deals on wheels prime minister," mocked Mr Howard. "No wonder the chancellor isn't a happy eater." And the Tory leader signalled the campaign to come, demanding: "How can there be discipline in schools when there's no discipline in government? How can they clean up hospitals when they can't clean up their own act? And how can they fight crime when they are fighting each other?"
This was the theme of the opening Conservative election poster campaign, which was unveiled yesterday as the party sought to capitalise on the rift between Mr Blair and Mr Brown.
Dr Liam Fox, Tory co-chairman, insisted that there was a serious aspect to the dispute, saying: "This is a week where we have had the pathetic sight of the prime minister and chancellor fighting like children in the school playground."
However, in the Commons, Mr Blair shrugged off the Tory effort, saying: "He (Mr Howard) can stick whatever he likes on billboards about something in a book, but what the public will concentrate on are the low mortgages, low inflation, low unemployment that we delivered and that he failed to."