David Blunkett said today he would take the Daily Mirror to the Press Complaints Commission over comments which the newspaper alleges he made about his involvement with a 29-year-old blonde.

The Work and Pensions Secretary, who will today tell the Labour conference in Brighton of his plans for the benefits system , denied that he had ever made remarks relating to Sally Anderson attributed to him in an interview with the newspaper. "I recorded that interview and I never said that and I will be taking the Mirror to the press council," he told Radio Four's Today programme.

Asked about his relationship with Ms Anderson, reportedly a City highflier who is training to be an opera singer, Mr Blunkett, 58, denied it was an affair and said: "It is a platonic friendship and I am entitled to a private life," according to the Daily Mirror.

He said he was "getting on with my life" following the "hell" of the fallout of his affair with American publisher Kimberly Quinn, and suggested he had not given up on having a long-term relationship, the newspaper reports.

Mr Blunkett admitted he had made enemies and mistakes, the newspaper claims. But he said people who were "sniping" at him could "do what they like".

The former Home Secretary told the Today programme this morning that he pleaded "entirely guilty" to having bullied the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Stevens, while he was in the job. Lord Stevens has repeatedly claimed that Mr Blunkett fed false stories to the press while Home Secretary. Mr Blunkett told the programme: "I plead entirely guilty to having bullied Sir John Stevens, as he was at the time three years ago, into a dramatic change in the delivery in the Metropolitan Police."

Asked by the reporter John Humphrys whether he could continue to do his job in the light of the kind of publicity he has been attracting, Mr Blunkett said: "Can you carry on doing your job at the BBC with the kind of publicity you’ve been getting?

"I know that the public can differentiate between somebody getting on with their job, taking on the most enormous challenges, balancing a radical social policy alongside the radical economic policy of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. They can distinguish that from the tittle-tattle that we have to put up with in our newspapers."

Mr Blunkett said he would not, in future, be answering questions about the claims. "The reason I’ve not answered this tittle-tattle blow by blow is because the moment I get down into the gutter and start answering these accusations, I start ending up having the kind of discussion that you’ve just inititated and from now on, I’m not going to deal with them at all," he said.

The Work and Pensions secretary tried yesterday to dismiss attacks on his honesty by both his biographer and the former head of Scotland Yard as simply the cut and thrust of politics.

On ITV’s Dimbleby programme Mr Blunkett said: "I’m an honest man but I’m not a saint." He added: "Do I tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? I do my absolute best to do so. Sometimes in my life I have made mistakes and I do not resile from that."

Mr Blunkett said that, as a politician, such attacks were to be expected. He said: "I’m in the jungle. Politics is a jungle. I walk through the jungle. I have made enemies. I have upset people. In some cases deliberately in terms of getting the delivery of services on the ground to people.

"I’m more worried about the big beasts dropping off of the branches than I am about those snapping at my ankles because my job is quite simply to get on with the work of reforming the welfare state."

Mr Blunkett said: "The difference between me and those who have been sniping at me is I have not accused them of lying. I have not made remarks about them. I have simply taken what they have thrown as being part of the cut and thrust."

Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, who retired as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in February, described in his autobiography how he and Mr Blunkett fell out. He accused the Home Secretary of briefing against him and Lord Stevens said the best advice he received about Mr Blunkett was: "Be wary of him — and never go to see him alone. Always take a witness."

The book, Not for the Faint-hearted, also described how Mr Blunkett wrote to Scotland Yard disassociating himself from rude remarks about the commissioner made in a biography by Stephen Pollard.

After seeing Lord Stevens’s book Mr Pollard questioned whether Mr Blunkett should hold public office.

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