London, Jan. 31 : Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has admitted that his barrister wife Cherie is cleverer than him but has been insecure about her working class background.

The former Labour leader said his wife, who was one of the youngest QCs in the country at the age of 40, was "streets ahead of him in "brain power".

"Cherie''s just really clever. But although she is more confident intellectually than me, I think might be more confident than her in other ways. She''s got a certain insecurity as a result of her background," The Telegraph quoted him, as saying.

Cherie Blair''s father, Anthony Booth, who was a well known actor, left the family home when she was only eight and subsequently remarried three times and has eight daughters.

Their mother Gale, and grandmother brought up Cherie and her sister Lyndsey.

Both Tony and Cherie Blair had parliamentary ambitions but when he secured a safe set in 1983 she decided to take a back seat and to devote herself to her family and legal career.

Blair recalled when he first met Cherie, they were studying to become barristers.

"Yeah, she was a mixture of obviously very smart and serious and knew far more about the law than I did, but she had quite a feminine, almost giggly side to her as well. So, there was a combination that I really liked of someone who was both smart and fun. I don''t think I could have settled down and lived with anybody I did not respect in terms of the mind and a capable human being and all the rest of it. No, we had a very good time," he said.

In the interview in The Times, Blair, who admitted he was haunted daily by the death toll in Iraq, was asked if he still owned the two flats in Bristol which his wife bought with help from the convicted fraudster Peter Foster.

"They are either sold or in the process of being sold," he said.

Pressed why he did not know, he replied: "I do actually, but I really don''t want to talk about it because you get a whole lot of ridiculous stuff out of it each time."

Asked if he still had mortgages, he said: "Of course. You can almost spot where the housing market is by seeing what I do and doing the opposite. So, yes I am being affected by the credit crunch."

Last October, one of the flats, which they paid 262,500 for, was sold for 260,000 pounds. (ANI)