How was David Kelly exposed?

Tony Blair today fuelled the row over David Kelly's death to insist that he had played no role in the "outing" of the government scientist as the source of the BBC's Iraq dossier story.

Speaking to reporters on the plane en route to Hong Kong from Shanghai, the prime minister stated categorically: " I did not authorise the leaking of the name of David Kelly."

Mr Blair said he "emphatically" did not authorise the leak, but he said the confirmation of Dr Kelly's name was a different matter, adding that the judicial inquiry he had set up would look at all the facts.

Questioned on why the government confirmed Dr Kelly's identity, he replied: "That's a completely different matter once the name is out there. The inquiry can look at these things."

The provenance of Dr Kelly's name in the media has become the new focus of the ongoing blame game over Dr Kelly's apparent suicide, 48 hours after giving evidence to the foreign affairs select committee.

Today's Financial Times claims the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, personally authorised his press office's strategy of confirming Dr Kelly's name to journalists who came up with it.

Meanwhile the Guardian claims that Sir Kevin Tebbit, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, came up with the idea of confirming the name if a journalist deduced it.

But although there were enough clues in both Mr Gilligan's Mail on Sunday account of his source, and Downing Street's background details, to allow well-connected journalists to arrive at Dr Kelly's identity, there is still some suspicion that Downing Street gave the name to select lobby journalists for it then to be confirmed by the MoD....

--Guardian

Meanwhile, a lot of Britons are thinking about regime change:

A new poll for the Daily Telegraph newspaper released Monday suggested the size of the political damage Blair, who was on a diplomatic mission to Beijing on Tuesday, has suffered in recent days. It reported that 39 percent of voters surveyed said Blair should resign, almost as many as the 41 percent who said he should stay in office. Twenty percent were undecided.
   
The poll also reported 59 percent said their opinion of Blair had dropped as a result of Kelly's death, while 64 percent now believed the government had not given accurate information about the Iraqi weapons threat in the days before the war began.

--Washington Post story, from tThe Salt Lake Tribune