TONY BLAIR bypassed his Cabinet and took the country to war in Iraq based on decisions taken by a small group of unelected advisers, a former member of his war Cabinet, Clare Short, said yesterday.

Normal decision-making processes “collapsed” without a single meeting of the Cabinet’s defence and overseas committee, the former International Development Secretary told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

The four-member “entourage” excluded Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, she said. He “went along” with their decisions but the power to make them was “sucked away” from the Foreign Office.

“Things were not decided properly — no records, no papers. In the Prime Minister’s study; all informal, in a small ‘in’ group of people,” Ms Short, who resigned after hostilities ended, told the committee’s inquiry into the evidence for going to war.

John Maples, a Conservative, suggested that the unelected “entourage” consisted of Alastair Campbell, Sir David Manning, Baroness Morgan and Jonathan Powell. Ms Short agreed.

“That was the team,” she said. “They were the ones who moved together all the time, attended the daily war Cabinet. That was the group that was pushing policy.”

“That is quite a collapse in the normal procedures for decision-making,” she said. “It was only the close entourage who were really part of this.”

Both Ms Short and Robin Cook, the former Leader of the Commons, who also appeared before the MPs, said that they had seen no intelligence to show an immediate weapons threat from Iraq.

Mr Cook, who left the Government over the decision to go to war, said that the claim he had made in his Commons resignation speech that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) ready for use had come “almost word for word” from a discussion with a member of MI6.

Mr Blair would not give a “running commentary” on the committee hearings, No 10 said. Mr Blair’s spokesman reiterated that those with allegations should produce hard evidence. The Foreign Office said Mr Straw would not comment ahead of his appearance before the committee next week.

Ms Short accused Mr Blair of “honourable deception” in a widening of her claim that his attempt to secure a second UN resolution on Iraq was a sham exercise. Her accusation that Mr Blair agreed a timetable in September with President Bush for war in February or March had been confirmed to her by “three senior people in the Whitehall system”, she said.

The Cabinet and the country had been led to war by a series of “half-truths, exaggerations, reassurances that were not the case to get us into conflict by the spring”, she said.

“I believed that the Prime Minister must have concluded that it was honourable and desirable to back the US in going for military action in Iraq and it was therefore honourable for him to persuade us through ruses and devices to get us there — so I presume he saw it as honourable deception.”

She had seen intelligence that scientists were doing biological and chemical research but no evidence that any weapons had been produced.

“This phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ — when it is used, people think of bombs full of chemical and biological weapons that are going to rain out of the sky,” she said. “They do not think of scientists in laboratories doing experiments . . . and I think that is where the falsity lies. Yes, he (Saddam) was dedicated to scientists carrying out chemical and biological work but the suggestion to the public was that it was all weaponised and a dangerous threat.”

More could have been done to help UN weapons inspectors. “(Hans) Blix asked for help with intelligence. The UK said we would give more intelligence and I had a briefing from the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) at that time.

“There were brave Iraqi scientists giving information and we knew about books and records and equipment being moved to houses. I said — let’s give Blix the information, let’s give him the helicopters, let’s get that house raided.” The Prime Minister “said, ‘Yes, yes,’ but it did not happen.”

The SIS had told her that the risk to Iraqi civilians of chemical and biological weapons was “not very high” but was “definitely there”. After inspections resumed, scientists were hiding material and “the risks were less”, she said.

No 10’s dossier issued in September said that Iraq’s WMD were ready to be deployed within 45 minutes of an order.

In his evidence, Mr Cook, who has served as Foreign Secretary, said that he had been taken aback that the September dossier was “very thin”. “There was a striking absence of any recent and alarming firm intelligence. The great majority was derivative,” he said. “The plain fact is that a lot of the intelligence in the dossier turned out to be wrong.”

He said that the second dossier — the one called “the dodgy dossier” because it included material from a PhD thesis lifted from the internet — had been a “glorious and spectacular own goal”.

He believed that intelligence had been used to support a settled policy rather than to shape decisions. “I think it would be fair to say there was a selection of evidence to support a conclusion.”

From his experience at the Foreign Office, neither Britain nor America had much intelligence about what was happening inside Iraq. “The absence of intelligence is a bloody thin ground on which to go to war.”

He did not believe Iraq had succeeded in creating biological weapons, and disclosed that in the late 1990s ministers had considered “closing the files” on Iraq’s nuclear and long-range missile programmes.

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