THE spymaster at the centre of the David Kelly inquiry finally took the stand yesterday, but for an awful moment no one appeared to have noticed that he had arrived.

As the small squat man sat down with a poker-straight face, the continuing chatter and shuffle in Court 73 suggested that most people had not even realised that John Scarlett, former head of MI6 and now chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was sitting in front of them.

He wore a blue suit with a blue shirt and a blue tie. He sat against a blue background. Boy, he was good.

He did not just blend in; he all but disappeared. In his squat physique, bald head and gold-rimmed spectacles there was nothing to confirm that this was the man who, as a spy in Russia, supplied other agents with invisible ink. Nothing that is, except the recurring twitch of a jaw muscle.

He spoke flatly, without an accent, without a hint of anything that might give away his origins. But there was steely determination in the even tone, the dogged insistence, the flat, deliberate way that he rejected anything put to him that he did not agree with.

When describing a spy you turn to either the reassuring glamour of James Bond or the unsettling dullness of George Smiley.

This man was Smiley. He would blend in anywhere. He spoke in monosyllables, courteous but impenetrable.

“I did . . . I did not . . . that is correct . . . that is not.”

This was someone who had faced ordeals more terrifying than a judicial inquiry. This was a man would crack a white pill between his molars before giving anything away.

Asked if there were rows in the security services about the dossier, Scarlett swallowed visibly and snapped “No.”

James Dingemans, senior counsel for the inquiry, tried to persist: “Were there any rows between . . .” Scarlett cut him off mid-question. “No,” he snapped again.

“Er, I had better finish the question,” said Mr Dingemans. “Between you and Mr Campbell?” “No,” came the inevitable reply.

Scarlett sat with his arms folded on the witness box. Every now and then he clenched and unclenched his fists. He was mild-mannered. He was dignified. But there were hints of control freakery.

“As long as I was in charge I was happy,” he said. “I was completely in control of this process.”

He was not a man to be intimidated. He revealed that Alastair Campbell asked him to make a statement on the Kelly affair: “I said I would not do that.”

By my count he dispatched six rivals during his evidence with this quiet, thumb-to-the-neck routine.

Asked about the Today programme report, he destroyed the reporter Andrew Gilligan, saying: “I knew instantly that it was completely untrue and there was no one in a better position than me to know that.”

He dispatched the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and its judgement that the dossier had been more strongly worded than it should have been. “No it was not. I do not agree.”

He dispatched Andrew Mackinlay, the MP for Thurrock, thus: “It is always unwise to claim that one has all sorts of rational thoughts in retrospect which one did not have at the time.”

He dispatched Mr Campbell with a wry aside: As Mr Dingemans remarked that the communications chief was not an expert on intelligence, the spy cut in with a rather unnecessary: “No he is not.”

Finally, he dispatched Mr Dingemans, cutting in on his closing question with: “I don’t think that is a fair representation of what happened at all.”

Moments later he was excused from the witness box. He shuffled quietly away.

Real spies are neither shaken nor stirred.

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