Alastair Campbell steers his way out of a tight corner

The select committee is taking evidence from many of the key players involved in the decision to take Britain into war and how that process was presented to the public.

As the inquiry entered its second week the prime minister's Communication Director Alastair Campbell decided to break with precedent to explain his role in releasing the "dodgy dossier" that plagiarised the work of a PhD student and seemed to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and accelerate military action.

In a letter to the committee's chair Donald Anderson Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said he and the prime minister had "agreed that Mr Campbell should exceptionally give evidence to [the] committee".

He explained this decision was "in view of the focus of part of the evidence on issues of communications policy for which Mr Campbell has responsibility as Chair of the cross-departmental Iraqi Communications Group."

Mr Straw gave evidence to the committee on 24 June and emphasised the justification for war had been the Iraqi regime's non-compliance with United Nations resolution 1441 and not the information in the dodgy dossier.

Campbell in the soup?

During his hearing by the committee Mr Campbell drew attention to the quality of information contained within the government reports on Iraq of September and February.

He described the September dossier as a "one of the most important pieces of work produced in the run up to the conflict".

The communications chief emphasised it had been produced and signed off by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), unlike the February briefing produced by the Communications Information Centre (CIC), chaired by Mr Campbell.

He acknowledged the mistake made in the February document, which drew on the thesis of Ibrahim al-Marashi without acknowledgement.

But he said that paper was never treated with the same seriousness as the September report as indicated by the way it was released - to a team of six Sunday newspaper journalists on a prime ministerial plane to the US.

"The second paper was not vital to the case of why we had to deal with Saddam and weapons of mass destruction," he said.

Mr Campbell emphatically denied there had been any attempt to mislead the British people with the information put into the public domain.

BBC role

He was especially critical of the stance taken by the BBC, whose Defence Correspondent Andrew Gilligan first alleged the government had "sexed-up" the September document to make a more compelling case for war.

"I think something's gone very wrong with BBC journalism", he complained.

Andrew Gilligan appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee on 20 June over his claims, but could not lend any more credibility to his story because of his concern to protect his sources within the intelligence services.

The Foreign Affairs Committee has one more session timetabled for Friday 27 June, when Jack Straw will appear again.

Part of that hearing may be given in private, but BBC Parliament will broadcast the public session live from 0900 BST.