TONY BLAIR'S hopes of ending the furore over the way he justified the Iraq war looked doomed last night.
His communications director, Alastair Campbell, was cleared by a committee of MPs yesterday of "sexing up" a Government dossier on Iraq.
But the MPs were still very critical of the Government's handling of sensitive information and concluded that Mr Blair inadvertently misled Parliament when he presented it with a "dodgy dossier" which purported to show the extent of Saddam Hussein's threat.
Opposition parties immediately demanded a full judicial inquiry into the affair.
The report by the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee was about two documents used by Mr Blair to make the case for war.
The first was published in September last year, and included a claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes - a claim the BBC was told had only been inserted in the report at Mr Campbell's insistence.
The committee found that Mr Campbell had played no role in getting the 45-minute claim into the document, although it said the claim was given unwarranted prominence.
Mr Campbell reiterated his demand for an apology from the BBC.
But the MPs only cleared Mr Campbell on the casting vote of their Labour chairman, Donald Anderson.
One Liberal Democrat, three Tories and one Labour rebel said there was not enough evidence to make a judgement.
The Tories and the Lib Dem MP also unusually voted against adopting the whole report - because of doubts over Mr Campbell - but were outvoted by the Labour members of the committee.
This gave the BBC the opportunity to stand by its original story - even though it had come from one uncorroborated source in the intelligence services.
The BBC said: "It is because of BBC journalism that the problems surrounding the 45-minute claim have come to light and been given proper public attention.
"We note that the committee was deeply divided on the role Alastair Campbell played in the compilation of the September dossier and only reached a decision which supported his position on the casting vote of the Labour chairman."
The committee condemned the role of Mr Campbell, an unelected special advisor, in the drawing up of a dossier of such sensitive importance.
The committee was scathing of the second dossier - known as the "dodgy dossier" because it plagiarised an 11-year-old academic thesis taken from the Internet - which Mr Blair presented to Parliament in February.
The committee said Mr Blair had "misrepresented its status" to Parliament, albeit inadvertently because he was unaware that it had been stolen from the Internet. This, it said, was "fundamentally wrong".
Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith called on Mr Blair to come to the House to explain what had gone wrong.
He said: "You must outline specifically why such a serious mistake occurred."
* Support for the war in Iraq has fallen from almost two-thirds of the electorate at the time of the conflict to less than half now, according to a poll for The Times.
The findings suggest that the recent rows over the Government's dossiers and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, in the three months since the fall of Baghdad, have eaten away at public confidence in Tony Blair's decision to commit Britain to war.
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