British Prime Minister Tony Blair rubbished talk of a split with his ambitious finance minister, saying the powerful partnership that has dominated UK politics in recent years had long to run.
"The partnership that we have had over these last 10 years and in changing the country is a partnership that will endure," Mr Blair said of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown.
"And it doesn't matter how many times people try to put rifts between us, it won't work," he told Sky TV in an interview at the Commonwealth summit in Nigeria.
Mr Blair and Mr Brown shared an office as opposition legislators before leading the Labour Party to election victory in 1997 and have held the top two posts in government ever since.
But insiders say the relationship between Mr Brown, the son of a Scottish clergyman, and Mr Blair, an Oxford-educated lawyer, is fraying because of the chancellor's desire to be prime minister.
Some say that after former Labour chief John Smith's death in 1994, they struck a deal at a London restaurant under which Mr Blair would run for the party's leadership on the understanding he would one day relinquish it to Mr Brown.
As rumours swirled in recent days of fresh tension between the two - fuelled by a split in the Labour party over Mr Blair's plans for university funding - Mr Blair was asked by Sky if he would always be the top dog in the partnership.
"I'm the prime minister, he's the chancellor," he replied, before implicitly acknowledging Mr Brown's ambition to replace him.
"As I've often said to people, that is not an ignoble ambition, people are perfectly entitled to do that. But I'm not dancing round all this over again."
Mr Blair has put his leadership on the line over plans to make students pay more to go to college, risking his first serious parliamentary defeat at the hands of rebels in his own party.
Fuelling rumours of a new rift in the pair's tempestuous relationship is the fact that leading rebels include key allies of the chancellor, notably former Cabinet minister Nick Brown.
Mr Brown, speaking on BBC Television, was loyal to his leader. "It will not be lost. We are going to win this battle," he said. "I've told Nick Brown, as I've told other people, that I want them to support the proposals."
He also insisted he was only interested in two roles - being finance minister and a new father.
"The job I want to do is Chancellor," he said. "I see huge opportunities ahead for the British economy."
Mr Blair lavished praise on Mr Brown for his record. "Over the past few years, the British economy under Gordon has probably been the best-run economy anywhere in the Western world," he said. "The job he has done for Britain and for the British economy is fantastic."
Blair denied that divisions over the Iraq war and now over plans to increase university fees had damaged his party, saying Labour was "in reasonably good and united order".