BRITAIN: The British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair last night accepted Conservative leader Mr Michael Howard's challenge to a head-to-head debate on the use of "flawed" intelligence to justify the Iraq war, writes Frank Millar in London
Number 10 confirmed next week's Commons clash as the Blair government awaited the more instant verdict of voters in the Leicester South and Birmingham Hodge Hill by-elections.
However, even as the Liberal Democrats launched their final push for a spectacular gain in at least of the two Labour seats, the Foreign Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, declared he did not regret the publication of the government's controversial intelligence dossiers.
Amid continuing fallout from Wednesday's Butler inquiry report revealing the "thinness" of the available intelligence, Downing Street also rejected a call from former Conservative leader Mr Iain Duncan Smith for the resignation of Mr John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) who becomes head of MI6 next month.
Mr Duncan Smith became the first senior politician to demand Mr Scarlett's head after the Butler report said the mistaken decision to reveal the JIC's "authorship" of the dossier had "had the result that more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear." Mr Duncan Smith said "somebody at some stage signed-off on that document" and suggested that by taking up his new post Mr Scarlett could damage public confidence in MI6.
However, a spokesman referred journalists to Lord Butler's report, which expressed "a high regard for his abilities and for his record" and insisted he should not be made a scapegoat for "collective" political and intelligence failures.
At the same time, the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr John Prescott, rounded on former cabinet colleague Mr Robin Cook, reminding him that he had also sanctioned "an act of war" with the 1998 bombing of Iraq.
But Mr Prescott's bullish performance after hearing Lord Butler clear the government of "deliberate distortion" or "culpable negligence" did not prevent Mr Howard stepping up his attack on Mr Blair, who he said had "misled" the country.
"When you have such a contrast, such a yawning gap, between the words used by the prime minister and the actual intelligence on which his words were meant to be based, then there is a very legitimate question to be asked," he told BBC Radio 2. "I think he should have come clean with the people. I think he should have told them exactly what the intelligence was. The evidence is that he didn't do that, that he misled the country," Mr Howard added.