LONDON, July 21: British Prime Minister Tony Blair has suffered huge political damage from the apparent suicide of an arms expert caught in a row over whether Britain was justified in invading Iraq, a poll said on Monday.

With 39 percent of respondents saying he should quit, Mr Blair, who is on a trip to East Asia, is grappling with his biggest crisis since he came to power in 1997 and even faces calls for his resignation from within his own party.

Despite the growing furore over the role played by the government in the death of former UN weapons inspector David Kelly, Mr Blair has said that he intends to stay in office, and rejected demands to recall parliament from its summer recess.

The prime minister promised to cooperate fully with an independent inquiry set up to try to establish the precise details surrounding Kelly’s death.

Lord Brian Hutton, the man heading the probe, said he would sit “mostly in public” and report his findings as soon as possible.

Hutton insisted in a statement that only he would decide the scope of the investigation.

Blair’s government has so far resisted calls from members of the ruling Labour party as well as the opposition for a wide-ranging independent inquiry into the way Britain joined the US-led campaign in Iraq, including claims that intelligence was “sexed up” to strengthen the case for war.

A poll for the right-wing Daily Telegraph newspaper found that almost as many British voters — 39 percent — thought Blair should quit as the 41 percent who felt he should stay on.

Blair had fallen in the estimation of 59 per cent of voters since the affair began, according to the survey, carried out by YouGov.

“Tony Blair and his government’s relationship with the British people, once respectful and even affectionate, would seem to have soured, possibly beyond redemption,” the Daily Telegraph said.

The body of Kelly, a 59-year-old Ministry of Defence consultant on biological weapons, was found on Friday. He is believed to have bled to death after apparently slashing one of his wrists.

His family said he had been under “intolerable pressure” after being grilled over suspicions that he was the anonymous source of a BBC news report in May — hotly denied by Downing Street — that a key official dossier last September on Iraq had exaggerated the threat of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal.

While the government has taken most of the flak for Kelly’s death, which has dominated the news in Britain in recent days, the BBC has also come under fire, with questions raised over the accuracy of its reporting.

After insisting for weeks that it needed to protect its sources, the public broadcaster confirmed for the first time Sunday that Kelly was the main source of its story in May.

A BBC statement issued on behalf of its defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan, author of the contentious report, said: “I want to make it clear that I did not misquote or misrepresent Dr David Kelly.”

But the left-wing Daily Mirror said the BBC’s defence of Gilligan’s story, while also saying Kelly provided its primary basis, meant the corporation was effectively accusing the dead weapons expert of lying.

“Either Dr Kelly lied to MPs (during a parliamentary probe) when he said he was not the main source, or Mr Gilligan exaggerated his own report,” the tabloid said.

Kelly’s local MP Robert Jackson, a member of the opposition Conservative Party, said BBC chairman Gavyn Davies should quit and Director General Greg Dyke “should consider his position”.

Meanwhile, Clare Short, who resigned as Britain’s international development secretary after claiming she was misled over Iraq by Blair, said attacks on the BBC were a “distraction from the main questions about how we got to war”.—AFP