Former Prime Minister John Howard believes he would have been seen as "a coward" if he had stepped down voluntarily for Peter Costello but would have quit had a delegation of senior ministers demanded him to.
Senior Liberal strategist Andrew Robb told Mr Howard that the coalition was headed for a "train wreck" as he attempted to convince Mr Howard to step aside for Mr Costello last year, a report says.
But Mr Howard told the minister that while he was pessimistic about the election, he "had more show of winning than Peter" and that history would regard him as "a coward" if he stepped down voluntarily, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.
A number of senior Liberals tried to convince Mr Howard to step down as PM before the November 24 poll.
A crisis meeting of cabinet ministers during the September APEC summit decided that Mr Howard should step aside but left the decision to him.
In a new interview, Mr Howard said he would have quit had a delegation of senior ministers demanded it.
"I'd have responded to that because they'd have been owning that request," Mr Howard said.
Mr Howard's views and those of other key figures are contained in an essay by Sydney Institute executive director Gerard Henderson.
The essay is being published in the August edition of the Sydney Institute Quarterly with an extract appearing in today's Herald, for which Mr Henderson is a columnist.
Mr Robb, who masterminded Mr Howard's 1996 election victory, had attempted to convince Mr Howard to step aside for Mr Costello, in an exchange in September.
"He spent 30 minutes telling me Peter couldn't win, he had more show of winning than Peter," Mr Robb said.
"I found none of it compelling. I spent 30 minutes putting my case and he spent 30 minutes responding."
Mr Howard told Mr Henderson that the party as a whole never made its view clear.
"If my senior colleagues were, as a group, prepared to own a request for me to go, I'd have gone," he said.
"But I was not going to, out of the blue, go because I didn't think that would have produced a different result and that I would have rightly been criticised for cowardice."
