Britain: Analysis Tony Blair might now find it impossible to resist calls for an independent inquiry into the British decision to go to war, Frank Millar reports from London
The unexplained death of the weapons expert at the centre of its row with the BBC cast a shadow over the Blair government yesterday just hours after the Prime Minister's night of seeming triumph in Washington.
Thames Valley Police will today complete the formal identification of the body found yesterday morning in a wooded area at Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire.
However, acting superintendent Mr Dave Purnell told reporters that the body matched the description of Dr David Kelly, a former member of the UNSCOM weapons inspection team in Iraq, and Ministry of Defence adviser, who had gone missing from his home on Thursday afternoon.
Dr Kelly had been named by Defence Secretary Mr Geoff Hoon as the probable source of the BBC's disputed report that the now-notorious information about Iraq's capacity to deploy weapons of mass destruction (WMD) at 45 minutes' notice had been inserted into the British government's September dossier at Downing Street's insistence against the wishes of the intelligence services.
A close friend, television journalist Tom Mangold, confirmed yesterday that Dr Kelly had been angry and unhappy about his consequent appearance this week before the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
Having come forward to his MoD managers and admitted having had unauthorised contact with BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, Dr Kelly told the committee that he accepted the process under way and his appearance before it as a result of his own honesty in admitting his contact with the reporter.
However, Dr Kelly told the committee he did not believe he could have been the source for the BBC report, and the committee agreed with him. Indeed, one Labour MP, Mr Andrew MacKinlay, told Dr Kelly he suspected he was "chaff" thrown up by the MoD to divert the committee's investigation.
Mr MacKinlay asked: "Have you ever felt like a fall guy? You've been set up, haven't you?" That was the potentially lethal question following Mr Blair and his entourage all the way to the Far East last night. Conservative leader Mr Iain Duncan Smith said it would be inappropriate to raise any wider questions until the police had completed their investigation and confirmed that the discovered body was indeed that of Dr Kelly.
However, his local MP, Mr Robert Jackson, suggested that if Dr Kelly had committed suicide then the BBC would be to blame. Against that, journalist Rod Liddle - the former editor of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme which first broadcast Gilligan's claim - asked some of the questions beginning to form on the lips of other MPs on all sides.
Speaking on Sky News, Liddle said: "We want to know what sort of pressure Dr Kelly has been put under by the government, or anybody else, but particularly the government. Quite clearly there was a concerted effort to root out whoever had had the temerity to speak to a journalist."
In the first instance these are obviously questions for the Ministry of Defence, which insists Dr Kelly had at no point been threatened with suspension or dismissal as a result of his admission that he had spoken to Gilligan.
However, the question of pressure brought to bear on Dr Kelly will not go away. MPs and journalists will want to know the detail of the procedures which were followed after Dr Kelly's admission.
And one Westminster expert yesterday predicted a series of questions and partial revelations which might well have implications for the Prime Minister's controversial director of communications, Mr Alastair Campbell, who has led the government's charge against the BBC.
Until now it has been possible to see the Campbell/BBC battle as an issue of interest to the inhabitants of the Westminster village, little followed or understood by the people outside it. Indeed, former Commons leader Mr Robin Cook has paid ironic tribute to Mr Campbell's success in providing a "souped-up" controversy which has diverted attention from the real question about the still-elusive WMD.
However, Dr Kelly's death will have changed the situation in a most grotesque, unimaginable and bizarre manner. And while some MPs may attempt to pin the blame on the BBC, the British public may well smell something badly wrong here. Nor will they be sniffing in the direction of the corporation.
For, whatever about who spoke to whom, the propriety of Dr Kelly's contact with the reporter, or, for that matter, of BBC claims authoritatively disputed in the name of the intelligence chiefs, the public will easily grasp that it was the government that outed Dr Kelly as the probable mole, thus triggering his distressing public ordeal.
It was doubtless with a sense of this that the announcement came from Mr Blair's aircraft yesterday that the government will hold an independent judicial inquiry into the circumstances leading up to Dr Kelly's disappearance.
However, there was a growing feeling at Westminster last night that - proper as that would undoubtedly be - Mr Blair might now find it impossible to resist calls for an independent inquiry into the whole question of the intelligence assessments which formed the basis of the decision to go to war.
In Washington on Thursday night, Mr Blair and his American audience rose to the occasion. Back home, too, many who supported Mr Blair over the war spoke of their pride on watching him - only the fourth British prime minister to do so - address both houses of Congress.
Yet opinion divided along predictable lines, with many on the Labour left appalled by Mr Blair's praise for American values which they, and others across the spectrum, fear trampled underfoot in Guantanamo Bay and in the American administration's continued hostility to the United Nations.
There was unease, moreover, at headlines proclaiming Mr Blair's confidence that history would forgive him and President Bush even if they were proved wrong over the coming together of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
At their joint press conference, Mr Blair corrected a reporter who quoted him as saying they would be forgiven even if proved wrong over Iraq's WMD.
However, the mystery is how Number 10, past masters of presentation, could have allowed such confusion to arise. And the suspicion that this might have been the latest in a series of modifications preparing for an eventual conclusion that they were right to rid the world of Saddam Hussein whether or not evidence of WMD "programmes" or "product" was eventually found.
Most people in Britain will probably agree with that. Indeed, for the Blairites, the absurdity of the Left is its seeming inability to concede it is a good thing Saddam is gone, such is its antipathy to President Bush. Yet, as Mr Cook doggedly reminds them, that was not the basis on which Mr Blair sent British troops into action, some of them to their deaths.
And the sense that the government exaggerated the Iraqi threat is clearly contributing to an erosion of trust which Mr Blair may find difficult to recover from. Throughout it all, Mr Blair has maintained the evidence would be found. Its discovery could not now be more urgent.