PRIME Minister Tony Blair today took a tentative step into the modern age of communications technology by taking part in a live text-chat with thousands of mobile phone users.

The Prime Minister admitted his texting skills were "under-developed" and relied on a team of helpers to input messages during his 35-minute chat.

He was able to answer only a fraction of the 6,000 questions sent in by O2 mobile-users on issues ranging from Iraq to street crime, pensions, health and immigration.

Mr Blair said he believed Iraq would become democratic, repeated hopes that George Bush would "intensify" his engagement with the Middle East peace process and promised more legislation to crack down on drug-abuse and anti-social behaviour, and assist first-time home-buyers.

He praised Gordon Brown as "a brilliant Chancellor" who had delivered a very strong economy and said: "I've always said he would make an excellent Prime Minister."

And he suggested that concerns over the impact of immigration on the UK were "exaggerated", saying: "I'm not saying there haven't been abuses of the immigration and asylum systems, but it is possible for people to get these issues out of perspective."

Personal

But it was his responses to more personal questions that were most revealing.

He confessed that he had tried mobile phone texting - or SMS-messaging - for the first time only a few days ago, and had had to get help from his 16--year-old daughter Kathryn.

"My texting talents are poor, let's say under-developed," he told Capital FM DJ Margherita Taylor, who was asking him a selection of questions chosen from the thousands sent in.

"My children are texters. My daughter took me through it the other night. The predictive one I wasn't too bad on, but the other way - let's just say it would have taken me a very long time to send a very short message."

Mr Blair confirmed that he had given up smoking on the orders of his wife Cherie when they married in 1980, and had his last cigarette 15 minutes before the wedding.

Asked by one texter if he thought Cherie would make a good job of running the country, he swiftly found a diplomatic response: "Fortunately, that's not a question that arises."

He named Nelson Mandela as the person, living or dead, he would most like to meet and said he would like his legacy to be "a more just society, with greater opportunity for people here and abroad".

Musical

Mr Blair's well-known past as a guitarist in a college rock band ensured a number of questions on his musical tastes.

He admitted he had spent "a large part of the morning" selecting his favourite guitar solo after being warned the question might come up, finally plumping for The Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird.

And he picked Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Ginger Baker to be in his all-time supergroup - admitting to Taylor that he was showing his age by choosing a string of rockers from the 1960s.

But he also praised the Band Aid 20 single recorded by modern stars and tipped for the Christmas number one, describing it as "excellent" and promising he would be buying a copy.

Perhaps the most sensitive question came from a texter identified only as Dorothy, who asked if it was true he did a brilliant impression of Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.

"No," responded the Prime Minister swiftly. But pressed by Taylor on whether he was sure, he added: "No... I don't know about a `brilliant impression'. Not in John's company, anyway."

Asked to reveal his salary, Mr Blair said it was public knowledge that he earned just under é180,000, joking: "It's not bad. Beats working for a living, doesn't it?"

As Mr Blair was talking, it took three moderators to send his responses via laptop computers to phones around the country over the GPRS network, which allows mobile-users to access the Internet through their handset screen.

Texters, who paid an average of about 10p to watch the entire event, saw a jerky webcam image of a shirt-sleeved Mr Blair along with truncated - and sometimes misspelt - versions of his comments.

Although the PM began the chat with short one-line answers suited to the text format, he became more expansive as the questions strayed on to complicated policy areas.

But the inputters were unable to keep up with his comments, and answers stretching to a couple of minutes were boiled down to a terse dozen or so words.

First time

Downing Street aides said that it was the first time Mr Blair had tried technology of this type and that he saw it as a way of communicating with the 18-24 year-olds who are the heaviest users of text-messaging.

O2's head of data products Hugh Griffiths said that about 50% of the UK's 52 million mobiles were now capable of using the GPRS network to access the Internet and take part in so-called Wap-chats. Today's chat was open not only to users of his company's O2 Active portal but to customers of other networks, and would also be posted on the Internet at www.o2.co.uk.

O2 later said the average age of those sending questions to Mr Blair was 25 and they were split 65% male and 35% female and spread evenly across the UK.

Some 4,320 people sent in questions over the Wap system and 2,406 by text message.

Tweet