Having been totally stumped at Prime Minister's Questions, Tony Blair has again failed to provide any justification for his claim that Iraq could get a nuclear weapon in a year or two. In a written answer published this morning, he says:

These matters have been examined during the course of the Butler Review and other inquiries, and covered during debates and statements on Iraq and in briefings by my Official Spokesman. All relevant information has been placed in the public domain in as far as that could be done without prejudicing national security.

Being Blair, he naturally implies that there might be something he can't say - the "I could tell you but I'd have to shoot you" national security line to which he resorts when desperate. But of course, the Cabinet Office has already admitted that it can find nothing to back up the claim.

Interesting that he does not mention Hutton, except that Hutton was apparently not interested in anything apart from the 45 minutes. But, as I have observed before, Butler recently called Blair "disingenuous" on the basis that his claims:

could simply not have been justified by the material that the intelligence community provided to him.