Wife: I persuaded Blair to stay on after Iraq

LONDON, England (AP) -- Tony Blair considered not running for a third term as British prime minister -- but his wife and others persuaded him that standing down would be seen as an admission that he had been wrong about the Iraq war, she said in her newly-published autobiography.

Cherie Blair also said that her husband decided to stand again in 2005 because he was not confident that his successor, Gordon Brown, would carry on with Blair's policies on schools, hospitals and pensions.

"Among many others, I was convinced that if Tony failed to stand for a third term, it would be seen as a response to the negative criticism of the war," Mrs. Blair wrote in "Cherie Blair: Speaking for Myself." Excerpts were published Saturday in The Times and The Sun newspapers.

"It would be read by history as a tacit admission of failure. ... I always felt strongly that he should not apologize for something he believed to be right. He could regret the lives lost in Iraq but he should not apologize for taking the right decision for the country."

She said Blair's confidence had been shaken by Labour losses in local council elections in 2004.

"There was no doubt that in April 2004, with Gordon rattling the keys above his head, Tony suffered a crisis of confidence as to whether he was still an asset to the Labour Party," she wrote.

"I remained determined that Tony was not going to resign, that he was going to fight the next election and that he was going to win it."

Labour did win, though with a smaller majority in the House of Commons than it had won in the landslides of 1997 and 2001.

Mrs. Blair's book appeared days after Brown suffered even worse results in local elections. Opinion polls now show Labour lagging far behind the opposition Conservative Party.

Tension between Blair and Brown, who headed the Treasury, was a running theme of Blair's decade in power.

The two men were leaders of the so-called modernizing wing of the party, and when Labour leader John Smith died in 1994 Blair and Brown were the leading candidates to succeed.

She said Blair felt some reluctance to seek to go first as party leader.

"He used to say in terms of ability that Gordon was way ahead of everyone and the irony is that if they'd only worked as closely together as originally agreed, his (Brown's) chance would have come sooner," she wrote.

One of the enduring stories of British politics is that the deal for Blair to go first was sealed at a meeting at the Granita restaurant in north London.

Not so, Mrs. Blair said.

Discussions between the two men began very soon after Smith's death, she wrote, but she suggested that the deal was made at the home of her sister, Lyndsey Booth.

"It was always a given that they would work in tandem and that when Tony stood down Gordon would take over. Tony also made it clear to Gordon that he had no intention of staying leader forever and that when he did stand down he would support Gordon as his natural successor, assuming they worked well together ... in the meantime," she wrote.

"As far as I know the timing was never discussed but when Tony left for Lyndsey's, I made my position perfectly clear, even if I framed it as a joke. 'If you agree with Gordon that you're going to do this for one term only, don't come back home. Because that's just ridiculous,"' she wrote.

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