On Wednesday Lord Brian Hutton will release the results of his inquiry into the circumstances of David Kelly's death and claims made by the British government about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Nothing less than the future of British Prime Minister Tony Blair hangs in the balance this week as a long-awaited report of the judicial inquiry into the suicide of weapons expert David Kelly is made public.
Lord Brian Hutton will release his findings on Wednesday into the circumstances that led Kelly -- the scientist at the center of allegations that Blair's government "sexed up" intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war -- to kill himself, hurling Blair into the worst political crisis of his career.
Most political analysts doubt that Blair will resign, at least not immediately.
The more likely first casualty is likely to be his embattled defence minister Geoff Hoon.
But the conclusions of the no-nonsense law lord from Northern Ireland risk speeding up Blair's slide in popularity among British voters, with opinion polls already showing that their trust in him is waning.
In the run-up to Wednesday, the 50-year-old prime minister has put on a brave face. "I believe I will survive it," he said on BBC television a few days ago, referring to the coming week.
"The issue vis-a-vis my integrity is, did we receive the intelligence [on Iraq] and was it properly relayed to the people?" he added in an interview with The Observer, published Sunday.
"Obviously, I believe that we did," he said.
But public opinion is liable to swing hard against Blair, depending on how critical judge Hutton turns out to be.
One poll for The Guardian, published last Tuesday, found that 63 percent of Britons want the prime minister to resign if Hutton says that he lied about revealing Kelly's identity.
Going into the weekend, Blair's position wasn't helped by the resignation on Friday of David Kay as the head of the Iraq Survey Group, which has failed to find proof of Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
To a far greater degree than US President George W. Bush, the prime minister sought to sell the Iraq war to a skeptical British public by warning of the dangers of Saddam's pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and the risk of those weapons falling into the hands of global terrorists.
RSS