THE Government was accused last night of misleading Parliament and the public by using "evidence" against Saddam Hussein that was lifted from a Californian student's outdated thesis.

Downing Street conceded it had made a mistake in failing to acknowledge that the report had borrowed heavily from a paper by Ibrahim al-Marashi.

The dossier produced by No 10 was designed to help win over sceptics by outlining Iraq's alleged efforts to hide its weapons of mass destruction. It was praised by US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday as a "fine paper".

But the revelation that sections of the dossier were reproduced from Dr al-Marashi's thesis seriously undermined the Government's stance over Iraq.

Former Labour minister Peter Kilfoyle said he was shocked at the way the dossier had been produced.

"It just adds to the general impression that what we have been treated to is a farrago of half-truths, assertions and over-the-top spin," he said.

"I am afraid this is typical of the way in which the whole question of a potential war on Iraq is being treated.

"I am shocked that on such thin evidence - a Californian post-graduate thesis - that we should be trying to convince the British people that this is a war worth fighting."

Another former Labour minister, Glenda Jackson, said: "If that was presented to Parliament and the country as being up-to-date intelligence, it is another example of how the Government is attempting to mislead the country and Parliament on the issue of a possible war with Iraq.

"And of course to mislead is a Parliamentary euphemism for lying."

Professor Michael Clark, director of the International Policy Institute at King's College, London, said that presenting such intelligence material "invalidates the veracity" of the rest of the document.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Michael Ancram called for a Cabinet minister to be appointed to oversee all information on Iraq issued by the Government.

The thesis was published last September but was based on material relating to the 1991 Gulf War.

Downing Street's dossier said UN weapons inspectors were outnumbered by 200 to one by Iraqi agents trying to deceive them, and provided "up to date details" of Iraq's security organisations.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman rejected Ms Jackson's charge that Downing Street had lied.

He said: "The fact that we used some of Dr al-Marashi's work does not throw into question the accuracy of the document as a whole, as he himself acknowledged on Newsnight, where he said that in his opinion the document overall was accurate."

Downing Street's concern to protect intelligence sources behind some of the material in the dossier may have been behind its mistake, the spokesman suggested.

Asked whether Downing Street was embarrassed about the affair, he said: "We all have lessons to learn."

Dr al-Marashi was not consulted before his work was used in the dossier. He said: "There are laws and regulations about plagiarism that you would think the UK Government would abide by."

Meanwhile, as Mr Blair returned to the North-East yesterday for a series of engagements - including a gentle game of carpet bowls in Hartlepool - anti-war demonstrators stormed the Labour Party's northern headquarters on Tyneside.