Mr Tony Blair's government was facing a full-scale political crisis last night after the weapons expert at the centre of the Iraq dossier controversy was found dead.
The Conservative leader, Mr Iain Duncan Smith, suggested the Prime Minister should consider cutting short his visit to the Far East, and said he did not rule out the possible recall of parliament.
Thames Valley Police will today complete the formal identification of the body found yesterday in a wooded area at Harrowdown Hill, near Faringdon, Oxfordshire.
However, acting Superintendent Mr Dave Purnell confirmed that the body matched the description of Dr David Kelly, a world-renowned expert on the former Iraqi regime's weapons of mass destruction programmes and an adviser to the Ministry of Defence.
Dr Kelly was named by Defence Secretary Mr Geoff Hoon last week as the probable source of the bitterly disputed BBC report that Downing Street had ordered its September dossier, making the case for war with Iraq, to be "sexed-up", against the wishes of the British intelligence services.
While the police awaited the results of a post-mortem, the MoD confirmed an independent inquiry would take place into the circumstances leading up to Dr Kelly's disappearance from his Oxfordshire home on Thursday afternoon and his subsequent unexplained death. It will be headed by Lord Hutton, a senior law lord and former lord chief justice of Northern Ireland.
The speed with which the inquiry was announced, ahead of formal identification of the body, underlined the seriousness with which Mr Blair viewed a personal tragedy which has re-ignited the wider controversy about the intelligence assessments on which he based the decision to go to war.
Gaunt and sombre-looking, Mr Blair arrived in Tokyo after first learning of Dr Kelly's disappearance, and then the discovery of his body, just hours after his triumphant address to both houses of the US Congress in defence of the war.
While welcoming the limited MoD inquiry, Mr Duncan Smith repeated his call for an independent inquiry into the issues surrounding the intelligence assessments, and the handling of them, by which Mr Blair justified the decision to send troops into battle.
"Clearly it is for the Prime Minister to decide, but if I was the Prime Minister I believe I would cut short this visit and return home," he said.
Mr Hoon outed Dr Kelly after the MoD adviser came forward and told managers he had had unauthorised contact with BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan. However, having originally thought he might be the source of Gilligan's report, Dr Kelly won the agreement of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee this week that he could not have been.