Intelligence chief ‘should not quit’

JOHN SCARLETT, the man who drew up the British Government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, should not lose his job as chief of MI6 despite flaws in intelligence in the run-up to the war, the Butler report said yesterday.

Mr Scarlett, the outgoing chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, accepted “ownership” of the crucial September 2002 dossier which wrongly alleged that Saddam Hussein was capable of deploying WMD within 45 minutes.

The report said: “We realise that our conclusions may provoke calls for the current chairman of the JIC, Mr Scarlett, to withdraw from his appointment as the next chief of SIS (Secret Intelligence Service).