LONDON, April 18: British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an interview published on Friday that he had instructed officials to prepare for his resignation if he lost a crucial parliamentary vote on war with Iraq.

Mr Blair told The Sun newspaper that he had been ready to quit if he was defeated in last month’s vote authorizing military action by rebel members of parliament in his own Labour party.

“In the end, it is a decision you put the whole of the premiership on the line for,” he told Britain’s top-selling tabloid.

“It was always possible that you could be in that situation. But the point is that some people are going to die as a result of your decision,” he said.

“In the end if you lose your premiership, well you lose it. But at least you lose it on the basis of something that you believe in,” he said.

On March 18, Mr Blair won backing from parliament for war against Iraq, \ but suffered a blow to his authority after MPs from his own party staged a huge rebellion against his hardline stance.

After a highly charged nine-and-a-half-hour emergency debate in the run-up to a likely conflict, the House of Commons backed a motion that Britain should use “all means necessary” to ensure the disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The motion was carried by 412 votes to 149.

But minutes earlier, 217 British parliamentarians out of a total of 659, including more than 130 Labour MPs, voted for an amendment which stated that the case for war with Iraq had “not yet been established”.

“There were moments when it looked like we were getting bogged down and 10 days in you were worried how long was this going to go. Had we miscalculated the degree of the depth of resistance?” Mr Blair said.

He said that he had been bolstered by support from his family and from people in the armed forces.

He insisted that launching military action was the right thing to do and that he had been “very upset” at the failure of the UN Security Council to back a second resolution authorising military action.

He praised Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar for backing Britain and the United States in the UN despite little support at home for war.

He branded comments by the fiercely anti-war Labour MP George Galloway - who urged British soldiers not to fight - as “disgraceful and wrong” and suggested that he could face disciplinary action from the Labour party executive. —AFP