BRITAIN: British Conservatives yesterday stepped up pressure on the Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, ahead of a crunch Commons debate on the Butler report, warning it would be "dangerous" for Britain if he was allowed to continue in office.
While stopping short of calling for the Mr Blair's resignation, Tory leader Michael Howard said he would not have supported the Government in the eve-of-war vote on Iraq if he had known the intelligence was so flawed.
Both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats warned that Tuesday's Commons debate on Iraq - when Mr Blair will face Mr Howard across the despatch box - could have a crucial bearing on the prime minister's survival.
Mr Howard raised the stakes saying he could not have supported the Government motion because it referred to Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction and long range missiles" posing "a threat to international security".
His comments came after the Butler report found that the intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons - described by Mr Blair as "detailed, extensive and authoritative" - had in fact been "sporadic and patchy".
"If I knew then what I know now, that would have caused a difficulty. I couldn't have voted for that resolution," Mr Howard said in an interview with the Sunday Times.
"If you look at the terms of the actual motion put to the House of Commons on March 18th, it placed very heavy emphasis on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I think it is difficult for someone, knowing everything we know now, to have voted for that particular resolution." Mr Blair only carried the vote authorising him to commit British troops to action with the support of the Tories after 139 Labour MPs backed a rebel amendment.
Mr Howard qualified his remarks, saying that he still supported the war and would have voted for a differently-worded motion authorising military action.
Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Sir Menzies Campbell, said Mr Blair should use tomorrow's debate to apologise for taking the country to war. "I don't understand why the government doesn't face up to this. Why on earth doesn't someone apologise? Why doesn't someone come to the despatch box and say 'look, we got it wrong. We are sorry we got it wrong'?" he said on Breakfast with Frost.
Meanwhile Mr David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group set up to look for Saddam Hussein's missing weapons, said that Mr Blair should have realised before the conflict that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction.
"I think the prime minister, as I would say the US president, should have been able to tell before the war that the evidence did not exist for drawing the conclusion that Iraq presented a clear, present and imminent threat on the basis of existing weapons of mass destruction," he told ITV1's Jonathan Dimbleby.