The Prime Minister's statements in the Commons conveyed clear assurance that there was no smoking memo, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
Is Tony Blair evil? Truly wicked beyond belief? Cynical enough to dupe his cabinet, mislead parliament and the country, double-cross his own spy chiefs, falsify their intelligence briefings on Iraq, and send British troops into battle - and some of them to their deaths - on the basis of a lie?
The finest fiction writers have not yet conspired to place such an amoral figure at the pinnacle of Westminster power. Yet there is no spin or exaggeration here.
The charge against Mr Blair could not be more grave.
Unnamed intelligence sources caused the most extraordinary and potentially damaging row of the Blair premiership when they told the BBC that Mr Blair or his director of communications, Alastair Campbell, pushed them to "sex up" information about Iraq's military capability to help persuade a reluctant British public of the case for war.
Mr Blair sought to draw a line under the affair on Wednesday with a bravura performance in the Commons, flatly rejecting suggestions that he or his office had in any way sought to override the judgements of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and exhorting his detractors to take pride in the collapse of a brutal dictator who had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people.
Within 24 hours the BBC was back on the offensive, claiming that intelligence chiefs were asked to rewrite the disputed government dossier on Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) at least six times. It was in the foreword to this dossier, published last September, that Mr Blair highlighted Iraq's alleged capacity to activate chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes.
And it was Mr Blair's perceived vulnerability on this point which inspired Clare Short's explosive charge that Mr Blair had duped the British people.
"I have concluded the PM had decided to go to war in August some time and he duped us all along. He had decided for reasons that he alone knows to go to war over Iraq and to create this sense of urgency and drive it: the way the intelligence was spun was part of that drive," the former international development secretary told the Sunday Telegraph.
She continued: "The suggestion that there was a risk of chemical and biological weapons being weaponised and threatening us in a short time was spin. That didn't come from the security services."
Ms Short may not be considered the most reliable witness; nor is she without personal motive.
She diminished herself by threatening to resign if Mr Blair went to war without a second UN resolution, then stayed on, having allowed herself to be convinced she was indispensable to the post-war reconstruction of Iraq; only finally quitting the cabinet over the absence of a UN resolution authorising the occupying powers just days before it was passed by the Security Council.
However, many Labour MPs and activists suspect that Mr Blair did indeed deceive Ms Short. Among the wider public, too - even among the majority who backed the action once British troops were engaged - there persists the feeling that maybe Mr Blair was President Bush's "poodle" and that the American determination to oust Saddam never actually rested on his perceived threat to his region or the world.
That credibility gulf explains why Downing Street cannot simply dismiss Ms Short's interventions out of hand. Moreover, it is the much more credible Robin Cook - who did resign on the matter of principle - who articulates the growing impatience at the failure thus far to unearth the evidence of WMD.
That failure in turn increases suspicion that Mr Cook might have been right all along when he ventured, during his resignation speech, that Iraq probably did not possess WMD, at least in the commonly understood sense of the term - "namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target."
Unlike the emotional Ms Short, Mr Cook casts no aspersions on Mr Blair's integrity; contenting himself on Wednesday by urging Mr Blair to acknowledge that the war had been fought on an assessment now found to be have been mistaken.
Others are less cautious. Lord Healey, a one-time Labour chancellor, suspects the British and American governments of "twisting" the intelligence and says if Mr Blair is found to have been wrong about WMD - or worse, knowingly made false statements - he should be replaced as Labour leader.
However, it is the knowledge that resignation could be an issue which leads Mr Blair's supporters, and not just on the Labour benches at Westminster, to the conclusion that he is not guilty as charged and that discovery in Iraq - if only from Saddam's own scientists - will see him vindicated.
On Wednesday Mr Blair invoked the full authority of the Joint Intelligence Committee to reject the claimed distortion or misuse of intelligence material, even asserting that the inclusion of the reference to a 45-minute threat was entirely down to the judgment of the JIC.
Despite Dr John Reid's suggestion that "rogue elements" in the security services were actually out to undermine the Labour government, seasoned Westminster observers noted that Mr Blair's statements in the Commons conveyed clear assurance that there is no smoking memo about to find its way to a BBC correspondent and contradict him with what would be fatal consequences.
"Oh, it definitely would be a resigning matter if he'd lied to parliament," confirms one Conservative with experience in government. "He can't have invoked the Joint Intelligence Committee unless he's sure of his ground. He's got to be telling the truth. And I must say I've sufficient confidence in the checks and balances in the system.
"You can't just cook up intelligence to commit the country to war and send young soldiers to their deaths. For all his faults, I don't believe that is the man who heads the government of the United Kingdom."
This Conservative source thinks "risible" the suggestion that Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair's formidable communications director, could intimidate or bully those who head the secret state.
"We're talking about the director-generals of MI5 and MI6. These are men who value their independence and hate being pushed around by politicians. They're not 22-year-old kids in the parliamentary press gallery."
Moreover, he thought his leader, Mr Iain Duncan Smith - a fully signed-up member of Washington's neo-conservative club, who even yesterday justified the liberation of Iraq for reasons beyond WMD - deeply opportunistic in demanding a judicial inquiry.
Mr Duncan Smith was unconvincing in asserting that Dr Reid's claims about rogue spooks - possibly a misjudged attempt to force dissidents into line by feeding their instinctive fears of MI5 plots against a Labour government - invalidated the intelligence on which the war was fought.
And there is more than a suspicion that the Tory leadership has joined the bandwagon in an attempt to damage trust in Mr Blair; not over the war in Iraq so much as in preparation for the coming battle over the euro and the new European constitution.
However, it was not the Conservatives who set this bandwagon rolling. And it was left to John Prescott to warn mutinous Labour MPs, led by a growing band of disaffected former ministers, that they cannot continuously question their Prime Minister's integrity without risking serious consequences for the Labour Party as a whole come the next election.
The subtext of Mr Prescott's unity call on Wednesday was also that too many Labour MPs have forgotten just how tightly the entire New Labour project - and its electoral success - is bound to the person of Tony Blair.