TONY BLAIR promised never again to mix spin with intelligence last night after being criticised for overplaying the evidence on which the Iraq war was based.

The Prime Minister remains secure in his job this morning after escaping serious personal criticism in a nevertheless highly damaging report from Lord Butler of Brockwell into the “seriously flawed” intelligence reports that buttressed the conflict.

“More weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear,” Lord Butler said.

Mr Blair was cleared by the former Cabinet Secretary of deliberately attempting to mislead the public and Parliament about the intelligence. “We found no evidence to question the Prime Minister’s good faith,” Lord Butler said.

But Mr Blair still took responsibility for the “mistakes” highlighted by Lord Butler, including the “serious failings” of removing from the weapons dossier qualifications and caveats about intelligence that were already thin, and the inclusion of the notorious claim that Iraq’s weapons could be deployed within 45 minutes.

He was also found to have reinforced the impression through his own statements that the intelligence was stronger than it was.

In spite of Mr Blair’s and his party’s obvious relief during an impassioned Commons appearance yesterday in which he again defended the moves to topple Saddam Hussein, there was plenty for the Prime Minister’s critics to bite on in the 196-page report.

And he was given notice by Michael Howard that the Conservatives will use the report to highlight a lack of trust in Mr Blair in their campaign to stop him winning a third general election victory. The Tory leader said that the country would never again trust Mr Blair to lead it to war.

The Prime Minister said that the report showed yet again that “no one lied, no one made up the intelligence, no one inserted things into the dossier against the advice of the intelligence services.

“Everyone genuinely tried to do their best in good faith for the country in circumstances of acute difficulty. That issue of good faith should now be at an end.”

But nobody in the Government was trying to pretend that the report was anything other than at best embarrassing and at worst painful.

Lord Butler said that the decision to give the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), under John Scarlett, authorship of the dossier was mistaken and put a strain on it in seeking to maintain its “normal standards of neutral and objective assessment”.

This was because the Government wanted the dossier as a document on which it could draw in its advocacy of a tougher approach to Iraqi disarmament.

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