DOWNING STREET and the White House sought yesterday to brush aside the final confirmation that Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction when they went to war in Iraq.

The Iraq Survey Group’s admission that it had failed to find evidence of Iraq’s missing arsenal, despite an intensive 15-month search, has been seized upon by political opponents as proof that Tony Blair and George Bush misled voters about the case for war.

Michael Howard said that the Prime Minister had not “told the truth about the intelligence received”, but added that removing Saddam was still “the right thing to do”.

Robin Cook, who quit the Cabinet over the war, said that it had been a “tragic mistake” that Britain and the US had refused to let UN inspectors finish their job. “Iraq was not a threat at the time of the war, as we now know. But it’s certainly a threat now,” he added.

But Downing Street said that the report showed “how complicated the situation had been”. Government officials have emphasised other findings on the erosion of the UN sanctions regime and Saddam’s use of oil money to buy international political support.

The report was published only weeks before the US presidential election. The Kerry campaign seized on it, accusing Mr Bush of being “in denial” about the realities in Iraq.

Mr Bush’s camp initially stuck to its strategy of ignoring bad news about Iraq. But yesterday Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, tried to make capital of some of its findings. He dismissed headlines proclaiming the lack of WMD in Iraq, saying, apparently without irony: “We already knew that.”

The report’s conclusions that Saddam still harboured a desire for WMD justified going to war, he said. “Delay, defer, wait, was not an option.”

There was also discomfort among governments that opposed military action in Iraq. The report said that leading figures in Russia and France had an economic stake in preserving the Saddam regime.

The French Foreign Ministry said that those said to have received secret oil vouchers had issued denials, including Charles Pasqua, a former Gaullist Interior Minister.

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