The view currently being canvassed around Westminster is that Alastair Campbell will ultimately be vindicated on the issue on which he joined battle with the BBC, the 'sexed-up' dossier on Iraq, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
'Have you blood on your hands, Prime Minister? Are you going to resign?'
It was an extraordinary moment. In Japan last Saturday Tony Blair stood frozen and silent before his press tormentor, his fearful eyes eloquence enough.
Other governments might have faced similar charges in the past. Margaret Thatcher had her Belgrano moment. She also peered into the abyss during the Westland affair, coincidentally also a row over a government leak which threatened to lead all the way back to No 10.
But this assault seemed of a different order: immediate, upfront, personal and very messy. The British government had a dead weapons expert on its hands. Dr David Kelly's presumed suicide came just days after his grilling by the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
The committee called him following his admission that he had had unauthorised contact with the BBC journalist, Andrew Gilligan, at the centre of the storm over the government's allegedly "sexed-up" Iraqi weapons dossier.
Dr Kelly (who was born in the Rhondda Valley) was reportedly promised his anonymity would be protected. Yet a weird guessing game had seen the Ministry of Defence confirm him as the suspected government mole to journalists coming up with the right name, after No 10 had apparently proved unusually helpful in reducing the field of suspects.
Had the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, sanctioned the leak? Would he have done so without No 10 communications director Alastair Campbell's authority? If there was a leak strategy, did Mr Blair know about it?
Dr Kelly abhorred finding himself in the spotlight and was reportedly distressed after his appearance before the committee, even though he persuaded the MPs he was not the primary source for the allegation that the government exaggerated the case for war originally broadcast by the BBC's Today programme.
Even before police confirmed on Saturday that the body found the previous day in woodland near his Oxfordshire home was that of Dr Kelly the instant press judgment had propelled the Blair government into its gravest crisis.
There were reports that Dr Kelly had been threatened with the end of his career and loss of his pension during five days of questioning at an MoD "safe house". And the instant consensus was that a good man had been "thrown to the wolves" in a government power-play with the BBC.
"Spun to Death" declared the Daily Mirror, friends of the dead man telling it he had been "devastated by his treatment at the hands of Labour's spin machine".
The Daily Mail was more brutal. "Yesterday a decent, shy civil servant who had been savagely chewed up and spat out by a malign, amoral Downing Street machine met a tormented and tragic end" ran the comment alongside pictures of Campbell, Blair and Hoon under the demanding headline: "Proud of Yourselves?"
As they observed his wretched demeanour in Japan, loyalists back home feared Mr Blair might indeed be swept from power on a tidal wave of grotesque events, in which personal tragedy was conflated with continuing public disquiet about the case for war with Iraq to erode further the British public's trust in this prime minister.
Yet by Sunday afternoon the pendulum had swung dramatically as the BBC admitted Dr Kelly had been the source for its report that Downing Street inserted, against the wishes of the secret services, the now-notorious claim about Iraq's ability to deploy weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in 45 minutes.
Government supporters in the Murdoch press attacked. "You rat. BBC man sinks to new low by calling dead doc a liar," charged the headline in the Sun, following Gilligan's assertion that he had properly reported the views put to him by Dr Kelly.
This indeed appeared an impossible position for the BBC, and No 10 believed it had turned the corner. Dr Kelly told the select committee he had been unaware of two key assertions in Gilligan's report, and Dr Kelly's journalist friend, Tom Mangold, had urged the BBC to remove "the stain" which would otherwise follow his friend to his grave.
He clearly assumed Gilligan had found other sources for the contentious parts disowned by Dr Kelly, namely that the 45-minute claim had been single-sourced and inserted late in the September dossier at Campbell's behest.
Mr Blair rightly says there could be no greater assault on the integrity of a prime minister than to suggest he sent troops to war on the basis of a lie. He has also assured parliament that the intelligence in the September dossier was signed off by the members of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Mr Campbell was right therefore to turn his guns on the BBC, and the view around Westminster is that he will be vindicated on the issue on which he joined battle with the corporation. For whatever anybody is found to have told BBC journalists, if Campbell is guilty as charged then Mr Blair lied to parliament, and it is he who would have to resign.
On what Mr Blair would call "the big picture", moreover, he patently did not take his country to war on the basis of a falsehood. The UN Security Council shared the assessment of Iraq's WMD capacity and ambition, which was why it passed Resolution 1441.
However, it seems possible that the terms of vindication may be less satisfactory than Mr Campbell would wish. The Daily Mail reported yesterday that his name did come up in an interview with Dr Kelly recorded by Newsnight's Susan Watts, in a passage in which the former MoD adviser says the government "was obsessed with finding intelligence to justify an immediate Iraqi threat".
On the face of it this might not matter much. No 10 insists the central issue is that the BBC misrepresented Dr Kelly's status by describing him as "a senior and credible source in the intelligence community".
Throughout the week spokesmen have repeated that he was "outside the loop", not involved in intelligence assessments, therefore in a position to retell little more than gossip.
However, that depiction of Dr Kelly is under growing challenge.
While no one is suggesting he was a spook, it is unclear where the world of intelligence begins and ends. It is certainly hard to see how Dr Kelly could have done his job without access to the most up-to-date intelligence on Iraq. If indeed he did brief those - such as MI6 - who in turn briefed ministers, then, as Richard Norton-Taylor observed in yesterday's Guardian, any misgivings Dr Kelly reported to journalists would have been extremely significant.
One conspiracy theory among many, indeed, is that Dr Kelly might have been used as a conduit by people in the intelligence services aware that he spoke to journalists. Might these have been the "dark actors" referred to in an e-mail to a friend? Might there be an explanation here for Dr John Reid's suggestion that "rogue elements" in the security services were out to undermine the government? Did the government recognise in BBC reports doubts and questions they already knew were washing about the system?
In other words, while the BBC still has a case to answer about his status, is there an emerging profile of Dr Kelly and his work which might nonetheless bolster rather than invalidate the general nature of the BBC's reporting of alleged concerns within the intelligence world?
Questions, questions. And the biggest of all, perhaps. Was there a conflict between what Dr Kelly was saying within the system and what he was telling journalists? If that prompts Lord Hutton to request Dr Kelly's papers, then Mr Blair may find himself at the heart of a much more searching inquiry than he envisaged when he invited the Ulsterman to take charge a week ago.