Blair under fire over 'by-passing Cabinet'

The row broke out today as Downing Street, MPs, Ministers, and senior civil servants digested the findings of Lord Butler’s report into the gathering and handling of intelligence before the invasion to depose Saddam Hussein.

Livingston MP and former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy led the attack on the way the Government used the information gathered by spies.

But Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott today defended Mr Blair over the allegations.

He claimed Mr Blair had regularly consulted his senior Ministers on the issue.

But Government sources promised that there would be changes to the way such procedures at all levels worked in future.

Lord Butler’s damning inquiry found intelligence reports used to justify the invasion were "seriously flawed" and that the Prime Minister’s Iraq dossier stretched the truth to its "outer limits".

It made clear that the claim that Saddam could unleash chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes was wrong and should never have been used.

But the inquiry insisted there was a "collective" responsibility for the failings and refused to point the finger at any individuals.

Mr Cook said: "There is no indication of what policy is going to change as a result of this devastating analysis.

"There are two things Tony Blair should say. Firstly, we need to return to Cabinet government.

"Secondly, he could ditch the doctrine of the pre-emptive strike which was the basis on which we went to war on Iraq. A pre-emptive strike against a threat in the future requires very good intelligence.

"What we now know is that you never get intelligence that is reliable."

Mr Cook, who quit the Government over the war, also expressed surprise that the inquiry did not criticise individuals: "It lays bare what has turned out to be one of the greatest failures in British intelligence ever and it is rather extraordinary that it then comes to the conclusion that everybody behaved entirely properly and nobody made any mistakes and nobody should take the blame."

Mr Kennedy said the report should have been clearer in apportioning blame.

He said: "There is not the identification of the political operators involved, not just the elected politicians but unelected political players - the Alastair Campbells of this world and those around No 10 Downing Street in hugely important positions."

But Mr Prescott defended the report and Mr Blair saying: "I can tell you as one of those who participated in the Cabinet discussion, we did back the judgement of Tony Blair.

"We did receive the information and judgements from our colleagues and in some cases we had papers to discuss and in all these areas we made a collective decision.

"It wasn’t Tony Blair on his own. It was a collective responsibility of the Cabinet and we did do that. Acting as we did at that time on the information given to us, yes, we made the right decision."

He said the process followed was exactly the same as that when the Cabinet agreed with Mr Cook’s recommendation to launch air strikes in Iraq when he was Foreign Secretary."

The criticism came as the Government’s chief legal adviser insisted that the Iraq War was lawful despite the Butler Inquiry’s findings that the intelligence used to justify the decision was "seriously flawed".

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, QC, said that the legal case for the conflict was based on Saddam’s protracted defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions.

Consequently, it was "not undermined by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction or by any reassessment of the intelligence".

Lord Butler’s report, published yesterday, prompted Mr Blair to concede that Saddam probably did not have WMD ahead of last year’s war.

Although the inquiry concluded that Iraq had no significant stocks of chemical or biological weapons, Mr Blair insisted he had acted in good faith and denied that the invasion had been a mistake.

The inquiry, set up to investigate the use of intelligence in the run-up to the conflict, criticised ministers for failing to challenge claims by the intelligence agencies that Saddam had WMD.

It also found that Mr Blair reinforced the impression that the intelligence underpinning the claims was "fuller and firmer" than it actually was. However, it cleared Mr Blair and other ministers of deliberately misleading Parliament or the public over the case for war.

The fall-out from the Butler Inquiry came as voters were going to the polls today in two Westminster by-elections at Birmingham Hodge Hill and Leicester South.