The prime minister has stepped up the pressure on Ken Livingstone, saying the London mayor should apologise for his remarks to a Jewish reporter.

Speaking on Channel 5's The Wright Stuff programme, Tony Blair said the mayor had made a mistake in his outburst against the Evening Standard journalist.

But so far Livingstone has refused to apologise to Oliver Finegold, who he likened to a "German war criminal".

Blair said it was time for the mayor to take action to put the row behind him.

"A lot of us in politics get angry with journalists from time to time but in the circumstances, and to the journalist because he was a Jewish journalist, yes he should apologise," said the prime minister.

"Let's just apologise and move on - that's the sensible thing."

The comments come a day after the mayor said he would not "buy off media pressure" by apologising.

And on Wednesday the mayor was declining to be drawn on the issue any further, saying that he was dealing with the visit of a team from the International Olympic Committee.

However, the mayor repeated his view that "the Holocaust was without comparison the greatest racist crime of the 20th century and Nazism the greatest evil in history".

"I regard the positive contribution of the Jewish people to human civilisation and culture as unexcelled both in itself and in particular despite the appalling persecution they were subject to for many centuries," he said.

"I therefore despise anti-Semitism with the same virulence I despise every form of racism."

Media firestorm

Livingstone said on Tuesday that he had "been through several of these media firestorms".

"I have always taken the view that if I have made a mistake I will apologise," he told journalists at his weekly press conference.

"When I went back on my commitment not to stand as an independent I gave a full apology to Londoners.

"When smaller instances have happened, people have been wrongly fined on the congestion charge, I have apologised.

"I am also not going to apologise if I don't believe I have done something wrong."

On Monday, Livingstone was uniformly condemned by the Capital's 25 member assembly after again refusing to say sorry for the remarks.