A defiant Downing Street last night continued to claim success for its military objectives during the four-day bombardment of Iraq. The Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, meanwhile launched a concerted bid to repair relations with European partners and build international support for the future "containment" of President Saddam Hussein.
But the cross-party consensus at Westminster - strong while British forces were engaged in last week's conflict - showed further signs of fracturing, amid mounting press and political criticism of the original operation and growing questions about the options now available to London and Washington.
After Mr Blair's "blooding" as a war leader, and the enthusiasm which accompanied last week's despatch of RAF Tornadoes, yesterday's headlines were something less than a spin-doctor's dream. The Daily Telegraph led on the warnings by the former Labour minister, Lord Healey, and Gen Sir Peter de la Billiere, who commanded British troops in the Gulf War, that the attacks on Iraq might actually have strengthened Mr Saddam's grip on power while damaging Britain's diplomatic hand.
In a play on Mr Blair's weekend assertions about the success of the operation, a two-page spread in the Daily Mail told its readers: "The monster is back in his cage: but 100 ft below the bombed city, Saddam smiles."
Disclosing further details of Operation Desert Fox, Number 10 shrugged off such criticisms, Mr Blair's spokesman insisting: "We believe the damage that has been inflicted in the last few days has left Saddam very weak and vulnerable."
With the nuclear-powered submarine HMS Splendid likely to join HMS Invincible in the Gulf after Christmas, the spokesman said the West would remain "vigilant" for evidence of Mr Saddam rebuilding his military capability, and that air surveillance - made safer by the damage inflicted on Iraq's air defence systems - would be intensified.
But as Mr Blair and Mr Cook sought to build international consensus on "a strategy for containment and a diplomatic strategy for the medium and long term," the government's domestic allies disagreed on what the ultimate objective of the strategy should be.
The shadow foreign secretary, Mr Michael Howard, warned of a "policy vacuum" developing, demanded a clear strategy from Mr Blair, and repeated Mr William Hague's view that its purpose should be the removal of Mr Saddam from power. But that view - reflected in yesterday's London Times editorial - was rejected sharply by the Liberal Democrats. Their foreign affairs spokesman, Mr Menzies Campbell, who had earlier cautioned that Mr Saddam would inevitably seek to rebuild his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, insisted: "The removal of Saddam Hussein cannot legitimately be an objective of British policy, even if it were feasible. To seek to have him removed would be to breach the same international law which the action against Iraq was designed to support. Tory calls to remove Saddam are unrealistic and almost certainly illegal."
Reflecting the increasingly partisan air, Mr Blair's spokesman suggested Mr Saddam's removal might once have been possible, during the Gulf War, but that Mr Howard and the Tory cabinet to which he then belonged, had decided against it.
Targeting Mr Saddam would involve a massive war and the commitment of hundreds of thousands of forces, said the spokes man, who insisted that critics of the government's strategy were themselves refusing to acknowledge difficult questions. Turning on Mr Howard, he said: "To say that because Saddam is still there, therefore you should do nothing, is an argument with the intellectual grip of a baby. The idea that you should only do something if you can topple him, as Michael Howard seems to be saying, is absurd."