Blair: 'I feel liberated.' MPs urge: 'Go quickly'

Strategy backfires with calls for early exit. PM may be forced out 'within two years'

Tony Blair is facing mounting pressure from Labour MPs to depart much sooner than the five-year deadline he set himself last week.

Tony Blair is facing mounting pressure from Labour MPs to depart much sooner than the five-year deadline he set himself last week.

As he emerged from successful hospital treatment for a minor heart condition, the Prime Minister told friends he was feeling "liberated" after a week in which he half apologised for faulty intelligence that sent the UK to war in Iraq, and announced his intention to stand down in five years.

Mr Blair believes he has given himself time to fight for public service reforms and other domestic policies, free from suspicion that he wants to cling to power indefinitely.

But even old cabinet allies were warning that he would have to leave sooner than he would like, to avoid putative successors engaging in a power struggle up until the moment the next but one general election is called.

Clive Soley, a long-standing Blair loyalist and former party chairman, said: "If I were him I would go very quickly, as Harold Wilson did, at a time when people are least expecting it."

Frank Dobson, the former health secretary and Blairite candidate in the London mayoral election, forecast that damage from the Iraq war would make it impossible for the Prime Minister to hang on for another five years. He said: "He has two to two and a half years tops of actually being in charge."

Mr Dobson added that the evidence from opinion polls, and from comments he had heard from the public, suggested that the Prime Minister is no longer the electoral asset he used to be, because of the damage done to his credibility by the Iraq war.

"He isn't an asset, because he is so closely associated with our disastrous policies in sucking up to the Americans over Iraq. Opinion polls show that if Gordon Brown were the leader of the party, we'd be doing better," Mr Dobson said, in an interview with GMTV, broadcast today.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, told the BBC: "We don't know exactly when he would intend to stand down towards the end of the term, but I'm sure it would be to allow sufficient time for the successor to be appointed by the party and then to fight a fourth general election."

His comments contrast with Mr Blair's announcement that he wanted to stay for the "full" term of the next Parliament, implying that he expected to be in office until 2009. His cabinet ally Alan Milburn underlined the point by saying: "I really don't know what it is that people don't understand about the word 'full'."

A smiling Tony Blair left Downing Street yesterday morning for a recuperative weekend in Chequers cleared of official meetings. Asked how he was feeling, Mr Blair replied "excellent". A statement thanked the London hospital for the "fantastic" care he received during the procedure on his heart on Friday.

He will go back to Downing Street tomorrow, before flying to Ethiopia for a meeting of the Commission for Africa in the capital Addis Ababa on Wednesday.

Publicly, he was bolstered by a call for party unity yesterday from the Chancellor Gordon Brown, in Washington for a meeting of the International Monetary Fund.

Before flying back to Britain, Mr Brown said: "The priority is to get on with the job of ensuring prosperity for the British people."