This is the lowest point,” Tony Blair said quietly. It was July 2003. He had just been asked at a press conference in Japan whether there was “blood on your hands” after the apparent suicide of David Kelly, a 59-year-old scientist and leading expert on weapons of mass destruction.
A week earlier, Kelly had been outed by the government as the source of an explosive BBC story, which claimed a Downing Street dossier on Iraq’s WMD had been “sexed up” to justify the US-UK military action against Saddam Hussein’s regime. The dossier alleged the Iraqi military was able to deploy some of its chemical or biological weapons “within 45 minutes of an order to do so”. The charge was potent because no WMD had yet been found, even though Blair was convinced they existed when he based his case for war on them.
