Blair admits: WMD hunt has failed

Tony Blair today held up his hands and admitted for the first time that the weapons hunt in Iraq had proved a failure.

"This is something I have to accept and it is one of the reasons why I think we now need a new inquiry," he said.

"It is true David Kay (who headed the hunt) is saying we have not found large stockpiles of actual weapons."

The admission brought the Prime Minister under immediate new pressure as MPs warned the legal basis which took Britain to war had effectively been demolished.

The Prime Minister denied that charge. He said that the war was legally justified because Saddam Hussein had committed "breach after breach" of UN resolutions.

He insisted the threat from Saddam was real, that it had been right to take military action and that it would have been "a dereliction of duty" not to do so.

The Prime Minister, questioned at length by a committee of senior MPs, confirmed that a full-scale inquiry will look at "discrepancies" in the intelligence on WMD. And it will also examine the way that intelligence "was gathered, evaluated and used by government".

The formal announcement, for which Mr Blair had hoped to win all-party agreement, was delayed by a last-minute battle with the Liberal Democrats. Their leader, Charles Kennedy, demanded a wider inquiry into the political reasons and the rights and wrongs of going to war.

That was brusquely denied by the Prime Minister who said such a fundamental decision was a matter for the Government, Parliament and the nation and could not be "sub-contracted" to any committee, however worthy.

Later it appeared that the Lib-Dems had walked out, although the terms had been agreed last night on behalf of the Tories by Michael Howard.

The investigation will be carried out by a five-strong committee headed by Lord Butler, who served as Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service under Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

The Prime Minister was given a rough ride by MPs as he struggled to explain why, after months of rejection, an inquiry on intelligence failures had been conceded, and why he was effectively admitting, after months of denials, the game was up on finding massive stockpiles of hidden weapons.

He acknowledged the evidence from Dr Kay, who last week resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, had left him no choice.

"It's not a question of changing position. It's a question of recognising the facts," the Prime Minister said. Mr Blair, however, stressed that Dr Kay had confirmed a mass of evidence to show Iraq and its dictator were a genuine menace. "What is untrue is to say that he (Dr Kay) was saying that there was no weapons of mass destruction programme or capability and that Saddam was not a threat," Mr Blair told the MPs.

Dr Kay's evidence to the US Senate had found "ample" signs of breaches of UN resolutions and WMD programmes and capability.

"He goes on to say that he actually believes that Iraq was possibly a more dangerous place than we had thought, that the conflict was justified and that if we had refused to go to conflict, then the security of the world would be put at risk."

Meanwhile, British intelligence is being targeted by the White House to carry the lion's share of the blame for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction.

Senior US officials have made clear their inquiry will focus on the role played by British intelligence. The nineman independent commission looking at alleged US intelligence failures has been told by the White House to make sure it takes a "broader context".