"Nobody is going to edge him out. There is no hurry. I don't see any hurry in this. Certainly, I'm not going to edge him out," he said.

As the prime minister, Mr Goh will decide on the timing, he added. "He has the responsibility to ensure that the transition is smooth and successful. I hope, as smooth and probably smoother, than the transition from me to him."

Mr Lee's remarks were made to the Singapore media in Shenzhen Dec 9, when he was asked for his response to the recent interview Mr Goh had given to the Asian Wall Street Journal.

Mr Goh had said in the interview: "Nobody is going to edge me out. In fact, if somebody wants to edge me out, I would dig in my heels. I'm not going to be just pushed over."

Mr Goh had added that his goal was to build and "have a new team in place" to lead Singapore by 2007. But the problem with grooming a new team of political leaders is that the number of capable Singaporeans willing to go into political life is "quite small", he said.

On this issue, Mr Lee said there are two reasons for the difficulty in finding able leaders. The first is the talent pool has probably shrunk.

"I can't prove this statistically, but I think that the fact that so many of our graduate women are unmarried and do not produce children, I believe that has lessened the number of talented people in the next generation," he said.

Families are also much smaller. "If you look at the older generation, you find one bright one in the family, then you find six or seven bright ones. Now, one child or two."

China, with its one-child policy, will have a similar problem, he said. "Theirs was imposed by law, ours was self-inflicted."

The other reason, he said, is just that there are more opportunities in other fields. "There's no compelling reason why they should sacrifice their privacy, their weekends, to go and attend to constituencies' needs.

"And so, there is less willingness to undertake what becomes an exacting burden on their time and on their families' privacy. So this makes it very difficult."

In the 1960s and 70s, he said, it was easier to get people to enter politics. "I could tell a man: 'Look, are you sure that your business will prosper if the government were to fall?'

"That's a very compelling argument. But they don't find that argument credible anymore. They say: 'If it were to fall, it will fall gradually, not suddenly.' So it is more difficult and bound to be so."