Jason Allardyce, Murdo Macleod, Brian Brady, www.scotlandonsunday.com

TONY Blair was personally responsible for the decision to subject Dr David Kelly to the public grilling his family have blamed for his death, Scotland on Sunday has learned.

As the Prime Minister prepares to give court evidence on the circumstances of the scientist's suicide, a damning declassified government document has revealed that it was he, and not defence minister Geoff Hoon, who ordered the move.

The evidence destroys Downing Street claims that Blair let the MoD decide how to deal with Kelly after it emerged he was the source for BBC claims that the government 'sexed-up' the case for war in Iraq.

The disclosure came as the Hutton Inquiry released an avalanche of government papers which threaten to further tarnish the Prime Minister's already battered reputation.

Documents and e-mails point to the full extent to which Downing Street was involved in the handling of the Kelly affair, including leaking his name to the media on the evening of July 9; a move which also placed him under enormous pressure.

But it is the revelation that Blair, and not the Cabinet colleague he tried to blame, who was responsible for Kelly's public humiliation which caused most anger last night.

Last week Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, stressed that the Prime Minister had regarded Kelly's treatment as an operational matter for Hoon's department.

That line is destroyed by a devastating document written by Blair's intelligence coordinator Sir David Omand after a crisis meeting with the Premier on July 8, five days after the Prime Minister learned Kelly was the likely source for the damaging BBC claims.

Omand's note, written on July 21, three days after Kelly's suicide, records: "The Prime Minister made clear that if, as he suspected, the Foreign Affairs Committee insisted on calling Dr Kelly to give evidence, then we could not in conscience order him not to appear, given the relevance of the information he had given us, to the FAC's own inquiry."

The decision was taken at the height of the government's war of words with the BBC over the so-called "dodgy dossier", after Kelly had told MoD officials he believed the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan had "heavily embellished" his story. The disclosure bolsters claims that Downing Street was determined to use the senior weapons inspector publicly as part of its battle to discredit the BBC.

But the tactic backfired badly when it became clear that Kelly's appearance before hostile MPs who dubbed him "chaff" and "a fall guy" left the scientist emotionally scarred. After his body was discovered near his Oxfordshire home on July 18, Kelly's daughter Ellen, who lives in Scotland, said: "Being called chaff and a fall guy did not help."

The Hutton Inquiry has heard that Hoon overruled advice from his officials to spare Kelly the public ordeal of a Commons grilling but it is now clear that the finger of blames points straight to Blair, who had decided the policy long beforehand.

As with the decision to subject Kelly to a hostile appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee, against the wishes of the scientist's boss Sir Kevin Tebbit, Downing Street has been attempting to blame the public naming of Kelly as the BBC source on the MoD.

Downing Street officials have told the Hutton Inquiry that Blair left such issues to the Ministry to deal with as "an operational matter" in line with normal MoD procedures.

But in fact, Alastair Campbell, Blair's communications director and closest aide, was at the heart of the guessing game which lead to Gilligan's source being unmasked.

In one e-mail to Philip Webster, the political editor of The Times on July 8, Campbell discounts a suggestion that the mole was a female foreign office official with one word: "Wrong." Within 24 hours The Times knew his identity.

The following day Campbell was copied in on e-mails from Foreign Office officials detailing how they had been feeding hints about Kelly's identity to journalists from national newspapers. In one, the Foreign Office communications director John Williams tells Campbell and a Downing Street colleague how he has been getting "a lot of calls from mole hunters" and how he gave a steer to both the Financial Times and The Guardian about Kelly's identity. Both papers named Kelly the next morning.

In another, Peter Ricketts, a Foreign Office political adviser, tells Campbell and other officials: "I agree with John [apparently a reference to Williams] that if the name is presented to us, we should confirm."

Evidence of the extent of Downing Street involvement in the most controversial aspects of the Kelly affair is a bombshell for Blair as he prepares to be only the second British Prime Minister to appear before a judicial inquiry.

Allies of Hoon, furious at Downing Street attempts to pin responsibility for Kelly's death on his department, warned the minister was determined to set the record straight when he gives evidence on Wednesday. One said: "He will not hold up his hands and say: 'Mea culpa.' I think a lot of people will be surprised by what he says."

http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/politics.cfm?id=932192003