So they did sex it up after all

This, at last, is the report that the country has been waiting for. Lord Butler has located the source of Tony Blair's credibility problem where it belongs - not with the BBC, nor solely with the intelligence agencies, but in some considerable measure with the Prime Minister himself and his staff.

It was never, of course, going to live up to some of the more lurid predictions planted in the papers as part of New Labour's expectation-management campaign. Lord Butler was always unlikely to pronounce the war illegal, to call Mr Blair a liar, or demand anyone's head on a stick.

His remit was to consider processes, not individuals; and it would have broken the habit of a lifetime for the ultimate bureaucrat to pen a smoking-gun sentence or a killer judgment.

But if the report is read in its own right, not against the pre-emptive Aunt Sallies erected by the spin doctors, the cumulative impact of its words is

often quietly devastating. The Prime Minister will not be destroyed by Butler. But he, and his style of government, have been damaged.

Butler details significant failures in the intelligence agencies - who take much of the burden of the blame. On Iraq, their sources were unreliable and poorly evaluated. Some were not just second-hand, they were third-hand. Others were new and untested, but given tremendous weight. Several have now been admitted by MI6 to be wrong.

But Butler also makes clear that, in the production of Mr Blair's famous dossier, intelligence was contaminated by politics. Established procedures - intended to prevent just that danger - got lost down the back of the Downing Street sofas.

"More weight was placed on the intelligence than it would bear," says the report. "The consequence was to put the Joint Intelligence Committee and its chairman into an area of public controversy."

This must, says Butler, be avoided in future: "We see a strong case for the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee being a person who is demonstrably beyond influence."

This is as clear a statement as anyone needs that the chairman, John Scarlett, was improperly influenced.

The dossier "put a strain on [the JIC] in seeking to maintain their normal standards of neutral and objective assessment". The judgments in the dossier "went to the outer limits... of the intelligence available".

Number 10 will make much of the fact that Butler does not directly accuse the Government of. knowing embellishment, or misleading the country. But that is exactly what some of his findings amount to.

On the 45-minute point, the thing which I claimed had been included as part of a drive to sex up the dossier, Butler is scathing. The intelligence was wrong, it should never have been in there, and there are "suspicions that it had been included because of its eyecatching character".

Slam-dunk, as George Tenet, the former director of the CIA, might say.

Butler finds that key elements of the dossier were misleading, because they were presented without the necessary caveats and explanations. This was a "serious weakness". But who asked for some of those caveats to be removed? The Prime Minister's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell.

Butler recommends that Downing Street be kept apart from any future processes which place intelligence in the public domain: "It will be essential that clearer dividing lines between assessment [ intelligence] and advocacy [politics] are established." Why so, if nothing improper took place?

Let us say, though, that the report, while pleasing, is not entirely satisfactory. Perhaps following his own famous claim to another inquiry that "half the picture can be true", Butler presents us with a half-thepicture-sort of effort. Like so many of these great-and-good inquiries, he exposes huge, terrifying failings, but curiously neglects to link them to anyone in particular. It's all subsumed in a convenient m鬡nge of unsatisfactory "process", too complicated to separate individual acts of culpability.

Not a whitewash, by any means, but perhaps a bit of a greywash.

So the 45-minute claim, the star of the dossier's press coverage, is now officially rubbish and should never have been included - but no-one is blamed for including it.

Intelligence was politicised - but the finger points to no politician or political appointee. Still, I think we can fill in the names without too much difficulty.

John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, "mate" of Alastair Campbell and proud "owner" of the dossier excoriated by Butler, is today's most obvious victim. He was supposed to be the gatekeeper of the system's integrity; he failed in this task.

Despite Butler's endorsement of him today, Scarlett's evidence to Hutton that the dossier process worked well and there was no political interference has clearly been rejected by the inquiry.

Today's report also makes Scarlett's defence of the 45-minute claim and his assertion that the dossier was "a very worthwhile document" look extremely silly.

And then there is Tony Blair. One of the delights of spin is that we can anticipate the main defences likely to be used by Mr Blair and his band of friends over the next few days, because we've already heard them being road-tested.

There will be the defence that "other countries' intelligence services were hearing the same things as ours".

This is a bit of an own goal, if the spin-doctors stop to think about it. If France, Germany and Russia were all hearing the same evidence we heard, why didn't it persuade them to back the war?

Then there will be the "I-couldn'thelp-it-if-the-intelligencewas-duff " defence. Certainly the intelligence was wrong, but it would have been much less wrong if it hadn't been sexed up. Mr Blair and his people piled exaggeration on error.

Then there will be the "worldis-better-off-without-Saddam" defence - true, but wholly beside the point - and the "Idid-the-right-thing" defence - again, quite possibly true, but Mr Blair should know by now that the end never justifies the means.

There may, who knows, also be the defence that the Butler report "does not substantiate" my story on Radio 4's Today programme that set off Tony Blair's second war of 2003, against the BBC. The actual issue is the Government's dossier, not my story. But this defence, too, is nonsense.

The story I broadcast last year was that the dossier had been sexed up. This has clearly been substantiated by Butler's findings of fact.

Vast amounts of attention-inhindsight were given to one single pre-dawn iteration of the story, the famous "6.07 two-way" on the Today programme in which I attributed to the Government weapons expert Dr David Kelly the claim that the Government "probably knew the 45-minute figure was wrong, even before they put it in the dossier".

At the time of the Hutton inquiry, the Government successfullydefined this to the judge and the world as the essence of my entire output, a slur which went round the globe, even though it was corrected within the hour and never repeated in any of my 18 subsequent broadcasts.

Nor was it noticed by anyone - including the press which followed up my story, the Foreign Affairs Committee, and the Government itself - at the time of the actual broadcast, or for weeks afterwards.

I spent much of the Hutton inquiry, and its immediate aftermath, fervently wishing that I had not made this clumsy, unscripted slip. But I feel less bad about it now. I was clearly wrong to attribute it to David Kelly, and for this I apologised.

But it now looks as if some members of the Government, if you include Scarlett, did know that the 45-minute claim, in the form in which it appeared, was wrong, before they published it in the dossier.

As Lord Butler makes clear, Scarlett knew, before publication, that the claim referred only to battlefield weapons, which are not offensive weapons in this context (Saddam being hardly likely to start a battle), and by some definitions not even a weapon of mass destruction at all.

As Lord Butler also makes clear, Scarlett also knew that the 45- minute point had been expressed more certainly in the dossier than in the original JIC assessment from which it was drawn.

And according to the American journalist Bob Woodward, the CIA told the British, before publication, not to include the 45-minute point in the dossier, with the director, George Tenet, describing it as "shit" (wrong, in other words.)

It might be worth recalling Number 10's denials of the story, the ground on which the BBC thought it was fighting and the denials which David Kelly's name was made public to further: "Any suggestion that there was any pressure or intervention from Downing Street [in the dossier] is entirely false." The story was "100 per cent wrong". And from the Prime Minister himself: "The allegation that the 45-minute claim provoked disquiet among the intelligence community... is completely and totally untrue."

No mentions there of any of the 6.07 allegations. Not much left of those denials after today's report, either.

I am pleased with Lord Butler's judgments, but I am not triumphant, or triumphalist. I recognise what Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell did not, after their Pyrrhic victory in January - that nobody in this saga behaved perfectly.

After today, though, who can doubt that the Government's behaviour was immeasurably worse than the BBC's or mine, yet has never once mitigated by the slightest breath of contrition.