Battered by failure in Iraq and bloodied by last year’s elections, Washington’s still unbowed neoconservative legions have found a cause around which they can rally: Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

The former chief of staff for Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, convicted on Tuesday on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, faces a prison sentence of between one and three years pending an inevitable appeal.

But his supporters are already calling loudly for a presidential pardon. Among them is David Frum, a former White House speechwriter, who said yesterday: “There is a palpable sense of injustice . . . at the absurdity, travesty and farce of all this.” He suggested that if any crime had been committed it was by Richard Armitage, the former deputy Secretary of State, who “continues to earn millions of dollars, go out to dinner, and be respectfully quoted by attentive journalists”.

Mr Armitage has admitted triggering the case by leaking the identity of a CIA agent to the press, in apparent retaliation for remarks made by her husband, Joseph Wilson, disputing the intelligence case for war in Iraq. Even one of the jurors said that Libby was the “fall guy” for others.

Mr Frum said: “Neocons feel they are being blamed for a war that they never ran and on which their advice was frequently disregarded. The people who did the leaking are many of the same people who messed up the war – and they have walked away.” The Libby Legal Defence Fund, whose advisory committee reads like a Who’s Who of the Washington Right, is listing on its website a series of articles calling on President Bush to exercise his constitutional powers of pardon.

Editorials in the National Review, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post have all said that Libby should walk free, while Democrats demand that the White House should rule out a pardon. If Mr Bush does issue a pardon, it will be considered as similar to that issued by his father to Caspar Weinberger, the former Defence Secretary, and others involved in the Iran-Contra scandal.

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