LONDON, June 23: Britain’s government made a surprise U-turn on Monday, announcing that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s director of communications would appear before a parliamentary committee to respond to claims London embellished a dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

A spokesman for Mr Blair said Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had written to the chairman of parliament’s cross-party foreign affairs committee on Monday, informing him that Downing Street’s director of communications and strategy, Alastair Campbell, would give evidence at a time to be set.

“Alastair has always wanted to give evidence but we were genuinely worried about the problems of precedence,” the spokesman said.

The prime minister’s office had turned down a second request from the committee to question Campbell only last Friday after claims he was involved in “sexing up” the dossier to make a more convincing case for war.

Explaining why there had been a U-turn, the spokesman said “it became clear over the weekend as a result of newspaper allegations that there were various allegations being made, both about Alastair’s role (in the dossier) and members of the staff, and also there were factual inaccuracies being reported.”

Asked whether the committee hearing would be in public, Blair’s spokesman said: “That is a matter entirely for the foreign affairs committee. Alastair is more than happy for it to be so.”

Parliament’s foreign affairs committee launched its inquiry after a BBC journalist claimed the government dressed-up its dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction to get Britons behind the drive to oust Saddam Hussein.

The inquiry opened last week with public testimonies from two former cabinet ministers who resigned over the Iraq war.

Although Blair has declined to sit before the inquiry, Foreign Secretary Straw will testify twice — once on Tuesday, and later behind closed doors.

Journalist Andrew Gilligan, a defence correspondent for BBC radio, last month quoted an unnamed “senior official” as saying that intelligence agencies had opposed the inclusion in the dossier of the claim that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons in just 45 minutes.

Questioned by the committee last week, Gilligan said his source was closely involved in compiling the 50-page dossier, published by the government last September ahead of the March war against Iraq.

Blair was US President George W. Bush’s staunchest ally in the run-up to the war and had contributed 45,000 troops to the offensive that unseated Saddam’s regime in April. —AFP