No, Mr Blair, you won't get away with it this time

In my lifetime, no British Prime Minister has faced charges as serious as those that are now levelled at Tony Blair. In the absence of discoveries of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a growing number of us are becoming at once ashamed and angry: ashamed that increasingly the evidence suggests that the Prime Minister misled the House of Commons in making the case for war; angry that it may turn out that 32 British soldiers were sent to a needless death hunting for something that didn't in fact exist.

Mr Blair laid out the main lines of his defence on Friday in Warsaw. I doubt if they will change much. He began by saying that the evidence we have of weapons of mass destruction was evidence drawn up and accepted by the joint intelligence community. This is the inner ring of the defence. The implication we are meant to draw is that Mr Blair just repeated what he was told. Nothing more. No hype, no spin. Mr Blair's ministerial colleagues, however, have undermined the veracity of this claim.

Turn to Robin Cook, who was a member of the Cabinet until just before the war started. He wrote in this newspaper that the dossier on Saddam's weapons contained no hard intelligence of a current weapons programme that would represent a new and compelling threat to British interests. It was, in Mr Cook's words, "curiously derivative". Listen next to Clare Short, who left the Cabinet when the war was over. She told a Sunday newspaper: 'There was political spin put on the intelligence information to create a sense of urgency. It was a political decision that came from the Prime Minister. We were misled. I think we were deceived in the way it was done." She added, on the BBC's Politics Show, that "on a question as big as this, where lots of people have lost their lives, the question of were we duped and was there a better way that wouldn't have cost all those lives is such a big historical question that we have got to get to the truth".

Yet throughout the period leading up to the war, Mr Blair was firm and precise in his description of the threat. Then hear Adam Ingram, the Armed Forces minister. He has revealed that Mr Blair's claim that Iraq could unleash chemical or biological weapons at 45 minutes notice was based only on a single source. Mr Ingram told the BBC that the claim "was not corroborated". This is a documented case, then, in which Mr Blair did harden up the advice he was given.

Mr Blair went on to say in Warsaw that he had absolutely no misgivings about the evidence. This is Mr Blair's second line of defence, an insistence that he is right. He told Sky News yesterday that he has "no doubt at all" that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction. Mr Blair - and Mr Bush - cites the discovery of two trucks that could have been used for biological warfare. But thus far no traces of biological weapons have been found on them, nor evidence that they had been used for a WMD purpose.

In the parliamentary debate held to approve the war, Mr Blair also showed great certainty: "We are asked to accept that Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd." The problem for Mr Blair is that Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, doesn't agree with him any longer. As he famously said last week: "It is... possible that they decided they would destroy them prior to a conflict, and I don't know the answer." Thus what was palpably absurd to Mr Blair has become a possibility for Mr Rumsfeld. And while Mr Rumsfeld says he doesn't know, Mr Blair remains sure that he is right. Or, to put it more accurately, the display of certainty is a debating weapon that Mr Blair brandishes when necessary.

Ridicule also. The idea that we authorised our intelligence agencies to invent some piece of evidence, or made them do so, is completely absurd, said Mr Blair. No doubt, except that an intelligence dossier was put out by Downing Street in February that was not what it purported to be. On examination it turned out to carry information lifted from academic sources, including a plagiarised section written by an American PhD student. Little of it was new. It was more or less a fraud on the public perpetrated by Downing Street. Now Mr Blair promises to publish another dossier. In the Sky News interview he said that the evidence for weapons of mass destruction would be accumulated over the coming months: "I certainly do know some of the stuff that has already been accumulated as a result of interviews... what we are going to do is assemble that evidence and present it properly to people." Properly? Isn't everything that Downing Street does proper?

This takes us to Mr Blair's third defensive position, which is simply to play for time. He told Sky that people should "just wait and have a little patience". What the Prime Minister hopes is that we will all gradually forget about the matter and move on. This is artfully linked with the assertion that there are more important things to be doing in Iraq now the war is over than hunting high and low for weapons of mass destruction. Our priority, said Mr Blair in Warsaw, is to rebuild the country, so the focus at the moment is on the humanitarian and political reconstruction of the country. None the less, Mr Blair's acknowledgement that more explanation is needed in the shape of a further dossier may have opened an unintended crack in the Prime Minister's defences, for it strengthens the case for an official enquiry.

In some ways, Mr Blair reminds me of the late Robert Maxwell, the tycoon publisher. I knew Mr Maxwell for many years before I realised that he had a quite different attitude to truth and falsehood than the rest of us. What he told you was precisely what suited his self-interest at the time, no more and no less. Whether his statements were right or wrong was purely fortuitous. And he had no shame about it. What Mr Blair says, I have come to believe, accords with what he thinks should be true on moral grounds - Saddam is a bad man, he must therefore have possessed weapons of mass destruction. But I am not sure that Mr Blair has any greater attachment to the literal truth than Mr Maxwell.

While nothing compares with the anguish suffered by the families and friends of those members of the British forces who lost their lives in Iraq, we shall all share in the shame if it turns out that the Prime Minister was wrong about the weapons of mass destruction. In St Petersburg over the weekend, Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, said that "if there were no weapons of mass destruction, then he, Tony Blair, should admit that he has misused intelligence reports and has misled world opinion". A few days earlier, the French daily newspaper Le Monde headlined its front page with the question: "Did Bush and Blair lie over Iraq's weapons?' Rather than being at the heart of Europe, as the Prime Minister constantly claims, I would say that right now British influence is precisely nil.

Mr Blair wore an open-necked white shirt and dark trousers when he addressed British troops in Basra last week. I dare say the choice of clothing was carefully considered by his advisers. What will be needed, though, if the charges against Mr. Blair are proven, are sackcloth and ashes.