MICHAEL HOWARD today raises the political stakes over Iraq by saying that he would not have backed the government in last year’s eve-of-war Commons vote had he known then that British intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons was flawed.

The Tory leader’s statement comes after the report by Lord Butler of Brockwell concluded that “sporadic and patchy” evidence was passed off as “detailed, extensive and authoritative” by the prime minister to bolster the case for war to sceptical Labour MPs.

If the Tories had not voted with Labour on March 18 last year, it is almost certain that Tony Blair would have been defeated and forced to resign.

Howard, in an interview with The Sunday Times, says the crucial government motion that authorised military action should not have referred to Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles” posing “a threat to international peace and security”.

“If I knew then what I know now, that would have caused a difficulty. I couldn’t have voted for that resolution,” Howard said.

“If you look at the terms of the actual motion put to the House of Commons on March 18, it placed very heavy emphasis on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

“So I think it is difficult for someone, knowing everything we know now, to have voted for that particular resolution.”

Howard’s comments will increase the pressure on Blair who has been forced by the Tory leader to explain the errors in a Commons debate on Tuesday. They mark the end of Howard standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Blair over Iraq as the Tory leader seeks to capitalise on voters’ distrust of the prime minister in the run-up to the general election.

Although Howard qualifies his remarks by saying he is still in favour of the war and would have voted for a different motion authorising military action, a decision by the Tories not to back the government’s motion would effectively have meant British involvement in the war would have been blocked. Blair survived the Commons vote with the help of Tory votes when his motion was carried by 412 to 149, after 139 Labour MPs had rebelled and instead backed an amendment saying the case for war was unproven.

The prime minister could not have accepted a reworded motion which left out the reference to weapons of mass destruction because it was critical in helping him to persuade many Labour MPs to support the war.

The Tory leader’s comments are likely to be dismissed as “opportunistic” by Blair and may raise eyebrows among his own MPs.

Howard caused alarm among some of his close aides when in May he broke ranks with Blair over Iraq by calling on the prime minister to speak out publicly against the United States if he disagreed with President George W Bush.

An opinion poll today shows Howard was right to claim in the Commons that people would not trust the prime minister again on war. The YouGov poll of more that 1,700 people shows that nearly half of voters — 46% — think Blair deliberately distorted intelligence evidence about Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons ahead of last year’s war, against 43% who say he genuinely believed what he said.

Trust in the prime minister has slumped. By 57% to 31%, nearly two to one, voters would not trust him to take the country to war again, although the 57% includes many who say they did not trust him over Iraq.

Voters have not warmed to Howard but are not yet fed up with him either. Most think it would make little difference to the Tories if he were replaced as leader. In contrast, Blair is still seen as a better leader than Brown, although only marginally, by 31% to 27%.

Meanwhile, senior MI6 officers expressed deep concerns about the misuse of their intelligence by Downing Street and three spies even boycotted all work on Iraq because they believed the war was wrong.

The extent of dissent by some inside MI6 over the spy agency’s role in the run-up to war appears to contradict evidence given to the Hutton inquiry by John Scarlett, the incoming MI6 boss, and Sir Richard Dearlove, his predecessor, that there was no serious dissent and that the intelligence was seen as reliable.

As pressure mounted for Scarlett not to take up his new post next month, it has emerged that MI6 officers feared that intelligence claiming that Saddam was “accelerating” production of chemical and germ warfare materials was overstated by Blair in the controversial September 2002 dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

An official close to Butler’s inquiry into intelligence failures said: “They felt that they didn’t have enough (intelligence) for what went in the dossier and were worried that MI6 might be found out.”

The official disclosed that MI6’s intelligence gathering procedures “went completely off the rails” in September 2002 when Dearlove went to Downing Street to tell Blair about a “new source” who claimed that Saddam was building chemical and biological laboratories across Iraq.

This report, subsequently retracted by MI6 as being unreliable, formed the basis of Blair’s claim that the threat from Saddam’s weapons had “in recent months . . . become more not less worrying”.

Officially MI6 says that it welcomes Butler’s criticism of its flawed intelligence operations and that steps are well under way to improving the way it checks the validity of its sources.

But behind the scenes it is clear that there has been deep unease in some quarters about its role in the Iraq war and the way its intelligence reports were mishandled by Downing Street.

The Sunday Times has been told that three “middle-ranking” intelligence officers have been moved from their post after objecting to working on the Iraq conflict.

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