TONY Blair overruled advisers by deciding to tackle the subject of Iraq head-on yesterday, even if he still balked at using the word “sorry”.

The Prime Minister’s speech did not include a passage, which had earlier been briefed to evening newspapers, stating he was “genuinely sorry” for the way the issue had divided the country.

Instead, his public contrition was confined to acknowledging evidence on weapons of mass destruction had proved to be false. “I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong but I can’t, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam,” he said.

Aides said Mr Blair had been determined to address the Iraq issue from an early stage of the drafting process because he believed it had become the “message blocker” on other parts of the Government’s agenda.

They admitted yesterday that there had been strong voices in his inner circle who urged him against devoting so much time in his speech to Iraq, saying this would reduce the impact of his pre-election policy announcements.

But Mr Blair decided that if he was going to talk about Iraq at all he “could not do it just a couple of pages”. The past week’s headlines over the fate of Ken Bigley served to make the issue even more prominent.

One senior minister suggested that Mr Blair’s greatest fear in the build-up to the speech had been that he would receive a message halfway through its delivery telling him that Mr Bigley had been executed.

Although the Prime Minister did not have words prepared for this eventuality, the passages on Iraq became lengthier throughout Monday night. He finished work at 1.30 am.

Alastair Campbell, his former communications chief, is believed to have joined senior aides such as Jonathan Powell, Matthew Taylor, Baroness Morgan, Lord Gould and Pat McFadden in helping Mr Blair to draft the speech.

Work on rewriting it began again at 7 am and there was some evidence of several hasty last-minute changes. An error near the end of the speech talking of the “importance”, rather than “impotence”, of opposition was repeated by Mr Blair.

However, aides said last night that the drafting process had been “less fraught” than in previous years. “Tony always wanted to talk about what we had done, the offer for the third term and then acknowledge that Iraq was getting in the way of this message,” said one.

Mr Blair’s very personal remarks about his own fallibility and doubts over this issue were also a marked contrast to the evangelical rhetoric which has characterised previous speeches.

A leading minister said: “We wanted to take the tone down a notch, that is why we announced policies in a ‘ding, ding, ding’ way, rather than build them into themes or narratives like we did in the past.

“This is the Prime Minister being conversational, not preaching. We think it reflects the way the public mood is different.”

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