In July 2003, I wrote an article for the New Statesman, The difference a day made, pointing out a big hole in the government’s defence to the claim that its spin doctors had put the notorious 45 minutes claim in the dossier. It had emerged that top spin doctor Alastair Campbell had chaired a meeting on the dossier on 9 September 2002, the day before Joint Intelligence Committee chairman John Scarlett had produced what was claimed to be both the first draft of the dossier and the first draft to include the claim. In observing that this wrecked Campbell’s alibi, I was only half right: the spin doctors did put the claim in the dossier that day, but different spin doctors at a different meeting.

It is now clear that the meeting at which the spin doctors suggested the inclusion of the claim was that of the dossier drafting group, on the afternoon of 9 September, where Campbell’s meeting took place that morning. The drafting meeting was attended by up to four spin doctors named in a June 2003 letter from Scarlett to Tony Blair as having been "involved" in drafting the dossier. They included including Foreign Office press secretary John Williams, who then produced his own draft of the dossier, which now appears to have been both the first draft of the dossier and the first draft to include the claim.

In my original article, I reported the Foreign Affairs Committee’s description of how a formal JIC paper that cited the claim was "discussed at a meeting on 9 September 2002". It now appears that this was the drafting meeting as the JIC paper was issued at exactly the time that that meeting started – 2pm that afternoon. It was "immediately after" the spin doctors saw the claim that it went in the dossier, probably in Williams’ draft.

During the Hutton Inquiry, I watched as many clues to the involvement of Williams and others in the actual drafting of the dossier emerged. When it emerged that Williams had written his own draft dossier the day before the one on which the government had based its whole case, it seemed obvious that this document must be significant, but no-one at the inquiry or in the media seemed to notice. Everyone seemed to fall for Campbell’s spin that these people were outside the loop. Even the (very late) disclosure of Scarlett’s letter to Blair, which left no doubt that Williams et al were on the inside of the process made no difference.

It is quite possible that within the next few weeks the government will be forced to release the Williams draft, because the Information Commissioner’s imminent decision will leave no doubt about its significance. The Information Tribunal has recently ordered the BBC to release the minutes of the post-Hutton governors meeting, overturning in the process the Commissioner’s very conservative approach to the same (Section 36) exemption that Jack Straw used in my case. An appeal in that direction would probably be seen for what it is, an attempt to delay further and an implicit admission of guilt. It may be that those who hope to be in government after Blair will realise how stupid it would be to move the inevitable "hit" nearer the election.

But in more realistic moments, I worry that for the most part the political and media establishment still doesn’t get it, doesn’t realise that the Williams draft could be the smoking gun or that confirmation that the spin doctors were actually drafting the dossier proves that it was sexed-up after all and that there has been a huge cover-up.

Today should be an important day for those of us who want to know the truth about the Iraq dossier

– the document that took us to war. The New Statesman is publishing my follow-up piece to Martin Bright’s story last November about the secret first draft, written by former Foreign Office spin doctor John Williams. At the same time, the Information Commissioner is finalising his ruling on whether the draft should be released. To mark all this, this website iraqdossier.com, which tells the whole story of how the dossier was sexed-up, is launched.

Today has been quite a day, starting off with publication of my piece in the New Statesman. Then Martin Bright was kind enough to lend me his blog and I did a another piece for Comment is Free, with the downside that they wanted my picture.

Reaction has been good and a few other blogs/sites have linked to the story and this site:

• Ian Dale's Diary
• Blairwatch
• Obsolete
• the durruti column
• Liberal England

It's all helped to get a lot of attention for the site and, most gratifying, people understand that it is a very serious and properly researched piece of work.

No word from the Information Commissioner. Watch this space!

This week's New Statesman carries my article The Iraq deceit, which reveals that the Cabinet Office has finally admitted that it cannot substantiate Tony Blair's claim that Iraq could develop a nuclear weapon in "a year or two". I am publishing two letters from the Cabinet Office.

• The first, from the office of the Cabinet Secretary, helpfully confirms "that all records relating to the production of the Government's dossier on Iraqi WMD in September 2002 and the subsequent inquiries are retained by the Cabinet Office."

• the second, is a final response to my Freedom of Information Act request, which asked what was the basis for the "between one and two years" timescale and a claim in an earlier draft that it would take "at least two years" for Iraq to get the bomb. In both cases, the timescales cited related to a scenario where Iraq might obtain fissile material from abroad. As I set out here, the Cabinet Office had previously declared the request exempt on cost grounds.

So the Cabinet Office has all the records but cannot find anything to substantiate Blair's - and the dossier's - claim.

Yesterday, John Baron MP challenged Blair on the claim at Prime Minister's Questions. Blair did not answer the specific question about the timescale. Baron has followed this up with a letter to Blair.

Yesterday I again emailed Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell, pointing out that the involvement of spin doctors on the inside of the process of writing the dossier goes to the heart of what he's been asked to look at. There's a Comment is Free piece about my recent correspondence with Sir Gus.

Today, Martin Bright of the New Statesman directly asked Tony Blair about the Williams draft of the dossier. Apparently Blair dodged but said he would get back to Bright.

Tomorrow there is a Westminster Hall parliamentary debate about the production of the dossier, initiated by John Baron MP and with Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells defending the cover-up, presumably.

I am publishing the evidence (pdf) of the Cabinet Office's Chris Wright in the recently concluded Information Tribunal case (pdf) around the authorship of the dossier's executive summary at the time that it was seriously sexed-up. Wright admitted that changes to the summary - including some of the most controversial and bitterly disputed - may have been “made following oral comments” from the “communications professionals who were working on the dossier from a presentational point of view”.

So it may, after all, have been Alastair Campbell who sexed-up the 45 minutes claim to be a "judgement" of the Joint Intelligence Committee. When this change was made, the Defence Intelligence Staff objected very strongly, as well as objecting to another new "judgement" which claimed that Iraq was continuing to produce chemical and biological agents. Campbell is implicated in that bit of sexing-up, having discussed the presentation of the claim with Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6/SIS. He then discussed the dossier several times with both Joint Intelligence Committee chairman John Scarlett and Scarlett's deputy Julian Miller over the next few days.

I've written a piece on this for the New Statesman online today.

Brian Jones, formerly of the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) told the Hutton Inquiry that people within the DIS thought the dossier had been over-egged. In this week's New Statesman, he has a piece marking the fifth anniversary of the death of Dr David Kelly, who told Andrew Gilligan that the dossier had been "sexed-up". Spot the difference Lord Hutton.

Jones argues that Whitehall has learned little from the dossier debacle and has failed to implement Butler's recommendations:

Thus, five years after the tragic death of David Kelly, little has changed. Both components of Whitehall, political and official, have ducked all criticism, appearing to have learnt little from the Iraq experience. Something similar could all too easily happen again.

On Comment is Free yesterday, Inayat Bunglawala suggests that the same thing is happening again over Iran, with SIS/MI6 (Chief: John Scarlett) feeding dodging nuclear claims to Telegraph journalist Con Coughlin.

I get a mention in Jones' piece. Co-indidentally, it's also five years since the New Statesman published my first piece on the dossier: The difference a day made.