British Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday flew back from a three-week family holiday in Barbados and straight into an ongoing row over the Iraq war, which has triggered the biggest political crisis of his career.

Blair, his wife and four children were whisked off to the prime minister's country retreat Chequers, west of London, where he will spend the weekend preparing for an unprecedented appearance Thursday before a judicial inquiry.

The probe, held in London and headed by leading judge Lord Hutton, is investigating the presumed suicide of government arms expert David Kelly, the scientist at the heart of a controversy about how Britain joined the US-led war on Saddam Hussein.

Blair was to testify a day after evidence from Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, who has come under pressure over his role in the naming of Kelly as the source of a BBC report which alleged the government "sexed up" a September dossier on Iraq's weapons potential ahead of military action in March.

Some 900 emails, letters and documents presented to the investigation over eight days have given the British public a rare glimpse into some of the secretive workings of their government.

This evidence has been scrutinised by Blair's opponents and the media, who are keen to discover just how far the prime minister is implicated in the affair and whether any blame can be attached to him and his ministers, who offered the US over 40 000 British troops for the Iraq war.

The judicial probe has seen senior officials, notably Blair's media chief Alastair Campbell, denying claims that despite the reservations of intelligence services, data was exaggerated to bolster the case for war, while the defence ministry has sought to stave off blame over the way Kelly's name was made public.

BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan alleged in a June report that Campbell was responsible for inserting a sensational claim into a government dossier that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

One piece of testimony seized on by Blair's opponents was a warning on September 17, 2002, by his chief of staff and close aide, Jonathan Powell, that it would be wrong to claim in the government's dossier that Iraq posed an "imminent threat" to the world.

A week later Blair, presenting the dossier to parliament, said that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programme was "up and running now".

Meanwhile, Donald Anderson, chairperson of a parliamentary committee that publicly grilled Kelly days before his death, revealed Thursday in evidence to the inquiry that Hoon did not want the scientist to be quizzed "on the wider issue of Iraq weapons of mass destruction and the preparation of the dossier".

Kelly's body was found with a slit wrist in woodland near his home west of London on July 18, days after the defence ministry confirmed he was the BBC's source.

Blair ordered an independent judicial inquiry into the scientist's death within hours of his body being found.

The inquiry ended a second week of hearing evidence on Thursday and was set to resume on Tuesday.

One of the biggest surprises of the probe came when a senior official at the Foreign Office said he met Kelly in February, when the scientist told him he had felt "obliged to reassure" his contacts in Iraq that if they cooperated with the United Nations they would not face attack.

"The implication was that if the invasion went ahead, that would make him (Kelly) a liar and he would have betrayed his contacts, some of whom might be killed as a direct result of his actions," the official, David Broucher, said Thursday.

"I asked him what would happen then," Broucher said.

Kelly replied, "in a throwaway line, he would probably be found dead in the woods". – Sapa-AFP.