PM meets Koizumi
Prime Minister Tony Blair landed in Tokyo Friday night at the start of his whirlwind five-day diplomatic tour of Asia.
He flew in from Washington where he delivered a speech to the US Congress and held talks with US counterpart George W Bush.
He is pencilled in to meet Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on Saturday at Hakone, a hot spring west of Tokyo, to discuss the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula and the military junta in Burma.
But questions have arrisen about the continuation of the trip following the apparent suicide of Dr David Kelly, the expert on Iraqi arms at the heart of the war of words between Downing Street and the BBC.
Some are calling for him to curtail his visit and to return home to face the music.
Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith is one of them.
He said yesterday: “There are many questions that will need to be asked over the coming days and I think if I were the Prime Minister I would want to be back here to deal with these.”
The PM and his wife landed at Haneda airport in a British Airways Boeing 777 at 22:35 local time (14:25 GMT) after hearing of the death whilst in mid air.
The PM spoke with communications director Alastair Campbell by satellite phone and discussed whether his itinerary ought to be changed.
But the “dodgy dossier” saga just wont go away.
The PM has been wounded politically, and appears assailed from all sides over the affair.
The Government produced two intelligence reports assessing Iraq’s capacity to launch lethal weapons.
One it has emerged contained a plagiarised section from a ten-year old PhD thesis. The other, some suggest, was doctored by sources close to Mr Blair, to include the clause that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction “within 45 minutes.”
The reports were used to assert the Government’s belief that war was necessary to oust the Iraqi dictator from power.
The Government said it was 99% certain that Mr Kelly was the “mole” in the BBC’s Today programme report in May, prepared by defence reporter Andrew Gilligan, which made the initial allegations in the “sexed up” dossier.
The Government believed the BBC would have to retract the claims if Mr Kelly was indeed their source.
Mr Kelly denied the accusations and the BBC refuses to name names.
It is the PM’s third trip to Japan. He travelled in January 1998 and in July 2000 for the Group of Eight summit in Okinawa.
He will fly to Seoul for talks with Roh Moo Hyun on Sunday and from South Korea on to China and Hong Kong.
Mr Blair’s official spokesman said the MoD would hold an independent judicial inquiry if the body was Mr Kelly’s.
