Butler spares Blair

Tony Blair is secure at No 10 tonight after he escaped serious personal criticism in the Butler report into Iraq intelligence.

The report finds serious failings in his dossier that justified going to war and in his style of governing. It also criticises spy chief John Scarlett and MI6.

But, crucially, like the Hutton Inquiry, it acquits the Prime Minister of lying.

A relieved Mr Blair made an emotional speech to the Commons in which he shouldered personal blame for the "mistakes" highlighted by inquiry chief Lord Butler.

"For any mistakes made, as the report finds in good faith, I take full responsibility," he told MPs.

But with his position looking stronger by the hour, Mr Blair made an impassioned and uncompromising defence of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I can honestly say I have never had to make a harder judgment," he said. "I am proud of this country and the part it played ... in removing two vile dictatorships and giving people oppressed, almost enslaved, the prospect of democracy and liberty."

Seizing on Lord Butler's findings into making the case for war, Mr Blair said: "There was no conspiracy. There was no impropriety."

But Tory leader Michael Howard said Mr Blair's credibility was in tatters because his own speeches had gone further about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein than the intelligence report.

Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy called for another inquiry - this time into why the Government decided to go to war.

Lord Butler's 196-page report threw Mr Blair a lifebelt by stating that Saddam was indeed a potential threat. It says that Saddam was planning and seeking to obtain illegal chemical and biological weapons and illegal long-range missiles, and had tried to buy uranium from Niger in

1999. "Other material may be hidden in the sand, including stocks of agent or weapons," says the report.

Although that falls far short of the claim in Mr Blair's dossier and Commons speeches that Saddam was a "current and serious threat," it was enough for Mr Blair to insist the world was safer with Saddam gone.

Lord Butler said in his news conference this afternoon that there was no evidence of deliberate distortion of the intelligence and that no single individual was to blame.

"This was a collective operation," he said. "There was no deliberate attempt on the part of the Government to mislead."

But the report says Mr Blair's decision to publicise the Iraq dossier as the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) was "a mistaken judgment".

And Mr Blair's entire style of governing, with Cabinet members kept out of the loop, meetings carried on without official minutes and much discussion kept within No10, undermined the traditional checks and balances and made errors more likely.

"We are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the Government's procedures

which we saw in the context of policy-making towards Iraq risks reducing the scope for informed collective political judgment," said Lord Butler.

"Such risks are particularly significant in a field like the subject of our review, where hard facts are hard to come by and the quality of judgment is accordingly all the more difficult."

Lord Butler suggests that responsibility for failings should be borne by all those involved in compiling the dossier, including former Downing Street communications chief Alastair Campbell, and Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff - and the Prime Minister himself.

Lord Butler said: "I think you could say that to the extent that there was this weakness, it was a weakness on the part of all those who were involved in putting together the dossier, which included the members of the JIC and all others concerned.

"I think they have to collectively take responsibility for that." The report is also embarrassing for outgoing head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove. Taking into account the difficulty of running reliable agents on Iraqi issues, it refers to " weaknesses in the effective application by SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) of its validation procedures and in their proper resourcing".

MI6 based some reports on information a decade old and of its main sources in Iraq only one was later found to be reliable. But the most intense criticism by the Butler team - described several times as " serious weakness" - was reserved not for No10 but for the intelligence chiefs led by Mr Scarlett.

The dossier project put a massive "strain" on Mr Scarlett's ability to maintain "normal standards of neutral and objective assessment".

In the end Mr Scarlett, chairman of the JIC and now named as next head of MI6, failed.

"In translating material from JIC assessments into the dossier, warnings were lost about the limited intelligence base on which some aspects of these assessments were being made," says the report.

"Language in the dossier may have left readers with the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence behind the judgments than was the case.

"Our judgment, having reviewed all of the material, is that judgments in the dossier went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available."

The report adds that Mr Blair's own description of the dossier as " extensive, detailed and authoritative" in a Commons statement reinforced this impression.

Lord Butler demolishes the claim that Saddam had chemical weapons ready to be deployed at 45 minutes notice. "In general we found that the original intelligence material was correctly reported in JIC's assessments. An exception was the '45-minute' report".

Lord Butler made an extraordinary appeal to save Mr Scarlett from being forced to resign over the failings.

"We realise that our conclusions may provoke calls for the current chairman of the JIC, Mr Scarlett, to withdraw from his appointment as the next Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service," the committee wrote. "We greatly hope he will not do so. We have a high regard for his abilities and his record." In future, however, the JIC should be chaired by someone " demonstrably beyond influence" and with the personal authority to stand up to senior ministers.

"We see a strong case for the post of chairman of the JIC being held by someone with experience of dealing with ministers in a very senior role, and who is demonstrably beyond influence, and this probably in his last post."

The report is highly critical of MI6's intelligence gathering.

It says MI6 relied heavily on UN inspectors - though there was little attempt to find fresh intelligence just before the war when the inspectors went back, implying the decision for military action had been taken.

On the existence of WMD, the report warns: "Iraq is a very big place and there is a lot of sand. It would be an unwise person to say that no stocks of agent will ever be found in Iraq.

"We did, however, conclude that Iraq had no significant stocks of chemical weapons and no developed plans to use them."

Lord Butler said the motives for the war were outside the scope of his investigation.

But his report hints strongly that the decision to invade Iraq owed its timing to political considerations and the influence of the United States rather than any change in the security threat.

"There was no new intelligence at the time Tony Blair changed his policy from containing Iraq by UN sanctions to considering military action.

The report said the Government was "influenced by the concerns of the US government" but also felt Saddam required action because of his flouting of UN resolutions.

Critics will take this as evidence that Mr Blair was persuaded to get tough on Iraq by President Bush. The report says: "We found no evidence that the motive of the British government in initiating military action was the protection of oil supplies."