Murdoch backs 'courageous' Blair and 'moral' Bush

Rupert Murdoch praised Tony Blair yesterday for his "extraordinarily courageous" stand on the Middle East, and gave his full backing to US-led strikes against Iraq.

With the Prime Minister facing insurrection within the Labour Party over the pros-pect of war, the media magnate signalled that Mr Blair could expect the support of his newspaper empire if military action begins. Mr Murdoch also praised President George Bush for acting "very morally, very correctly" in the crisis.

He told The Bulletin, an Australian magazine: "I think Tony is being extraordinarily courageous and strong on what his stance is in the Middle East.

"It's not easy to do that living in a party which is largely composed of people that have a knee-jerk anti-Americanism and are sort of pacifist. But he's shown great guts, as he did, I think, in Kosovo and over various problems in the old Yugoslavia."

Mr Murdoch, who is the head of News Corporation, which owns The Times and The Sun newspapers and has a stake in Sky television, added: "We can't back down now, where you hand over the whole of the Middle East to Saddam and I think Bush is acting very morally, very correctly, and I think he is going to go on with it. He will either go down in history as a very great president or he'll crash and burn; I'm optimistic it will be the former by a ratio of two to one."

The tycoon said he was closer to Gordon Brown than Mr Blair but took a swipe at the Chancellor's politics. "We are more against Gordon Brown than we are against Tony Blair, and Gordon is, if anything, more of a friend. I admire him as a person," said Mr Murdoch.

"But his insistence that only the Government can provide health services and education and just locking out the private sector is really a huge mistake.

"No one government, one cabinet or one person can run a health service with over one million employees. It is just impossible."

Mr Blair's problems in securing domestic political support for his strategy over Iraq deepened last night as the Tories delivered their most scathing attack on his handling of the crisis.

Bernard Jenkin, the shadow Defence Secretary, said the Tory party "broadly" supported the Government's determination to disarm President Saddam. But he said: "We're already extremely concerned about the Government's undermining of British public opinion with such appalling and reprehensible, cack-handed initiatives as the dodgy dossier published by No 10 last week.

"How can the Prime Minister restore his personal authority after he has been so abjectly found out?"

But Michael Portillo, the former cabinet minister and former Tory leadership contender praised Mr Blair for developing "a new political personality in which he is very hard-edged, very ideological, very certain".

He said the Prime Minister tried to be "all things to all people" in his first spell in power, but now got on with things "whether public opinion is with him or without".

Mr Portillo added: "The course he's embarked upon is much more dangerous. I applaud him for doing it. I point out that he's the only leader that I can think of who is moving against his public opinion with courage."