Evidence won't be published

Plans to publish the testimony of the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan have been dropped by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee after it received a "private communication" from Gavyn Davies, the chairman of the BBC.

The attempts by MPs and the BBC to cool the row came as Prime Minister Tony Blair returned to Britain at the end of his seven-day world tour. Blair immediately began talks with his senior advisers, including Alastair Campbell, his communications director, about how to handle the crisis over the apparent suicide of defence scientist Dr David Kelly.

Blair will come under the spotlight when he holds his monthly press conference next Wednesday. He will face fierce questioning about whether Downing St authorised the release of Dr Kelly's name to the press.

The Prime Minister is also facing the prospect of giving evidence in public to the Hutton inquiry into Dr Kelly's death. It emerged yesterday that Blair knew a week before Dr Kelly's name was made public that a scientist had come forward as a source. An article in The Spectator magazine argues that Downing St's part in events was bigger than that initially claimed.

No 10 has said it was only "consulted" about the Kelly affair, but the magazine highlights reports in the press that suggest that Downing St played "the decisive role in the leaking of the name".

It quotes one article by the political journalist Patrick Wintour, of the Guardian, who has high-level contacts at Downing St. In an article on July 9, Wintour wrote that No 10 was "confident it had tracked down the [Andrew] Gilligan source".

It hinted that Campbell had decided to play an active part in how the matter was dealt with: "Campbell could have let the matter lie and allowed the MoD to deal with the issue internally. But - in the view of Downing St - over the weekend the BBC director general Greg Dyke had improperly bullied the BBC governors into backing Gilligan," Wintour wrote. "Anyway, Campbell is not a man to let a matter like this rest."

Yesterday the Ministry of Defence confirmed that it had received a request from the Foreign Affairs Select committee to provide a list of the journalists Dr Kelly had met. The scientist had agreed to give the committee a complete list of contacts with journalists since last year. The deadline for providing the list was Thursday, July 17, the day he was found dead.

Donald Anderson, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said the committee would not publish Gilligan's evidence but would make it available to Lord Hutton's inquiry. The inquiry hearings will not be broadcast, which will prevent the public seeing Campbell, or the Prime Minister giving evidence.

The BBC said that its request to the committee not to publish the evidence of Gilligan was designed to avoid reigniting the furore.

"It would cause a bit of a media frenzy and we want to dampen it down as far as possible," said a spokeswoman.

Gilligan's second evidence session led to the committee saying he was a "unsatisfactory witness". Gilligan claimed he had been ambushed by loyalist Labour MPs.

Kelly, dismissed by Downing St as just a "middle-ranking technician", was considered by his peers around the world as the most senior germ warfare expert in Britain.

Rolf Ekeus, former chief of the United Nations arms inspectorate which investigated Saddam Hussein's arsenal after the 1991 Gulf War, said "If there was a Nobel prize for arms control, Dr Kelly and his team should have been awarded it".

Richard Spertzel, who headed the four-man Unscom specialist team investigating Iraq's biological programme, described Dr Kelly yesterday as the "foremost expert on biological weapons in Britain".

The Government had tried to play down Dr Kelly's importance to discredit him as the BBC's main source for the claim that Downing St "sexed up" the September dossier.

No 10 claimed Dr Kelly was a "technical adviser", and "he was not someone who had access to the intelligence which was in the dossier".

But Dr Kelly not only had access to intelligence on Iraq but was consulted by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Ministry of Defence on processing such intelligence.

He was also becoming increasingly sceptical about Iraq's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in the time leading up to his death. It was Dr Kelly who exposed claims by President George Bush, Tony Blair and Colin Powell that mobile biological warfare units had been found in Iraq as false. Colleagues say he had begun to believe that the Unscom team, of which he was a part, had destroyed much of Iraqi capabilities.

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INDEPENDENT

British Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee transcript:

Evidence of Dr David Kelly

Key players in the 'sexed-up dossier' affair

Herald Feature: Iraq