By Nick Higham BBC media correspondent

Were the BBC's governors too soft on its managers?

Jonathan Sumption QC, counsel for the government, put the question in a dozen different ways. Each time Mr Davies batted it back confidently, at times almost imperiously.

When Mr Sumption at one point suggested a press statement had been watered down to avoid embarrassing management, Mr Davies remarked "I've never heard such nonsense".

The question is important because of the others it leads on to. Should the governors have asked to see Andrew Gilligan's notes of his conversation with Dr David Kelly?

Not many telling blows were landed on Gavyn Davies

Should they have had more information about Andrew Gilligan's source - enough, at any rate, to avoid the mistaken assumption that he might have been in the intelligence services?

Were they so anxious not to be seen to buckle beneath the onslaught from Alastair Campbell that they forgot their wider duties?

Above all, if the governors had sued for peace with the government or disowned their reporter's story after their special meeting on 6 July, rather than backing it, would Dr David Kelly still be alive today?

That last question may be unanswerable, and was not put by Mr Sumption. The others were.

Mr Davies reiterated what BBC witnesses have said several times before. The scale of the government's attack meant the governors had to respond.

'Public interest'

"We were faced with such an intemperate attack on our impartiality and our integrity that I think it was perfectly reasonable to take the view that the public were looking to the governors to stand up for the public interest," Mr Davies said.

He rejected suggestions that, in the light of all this, the governors chose to close ranks behind their management and journalists. The statement they issued had in parts been critical of the management.

But it had not been the governors' job to look into the accuracy of Andrew Gilligan's story or establish his source's status and whether he had been accurately reported. They had taken their senior managers' word for that.

"If the Board of Governors sought to duplicate all aspects of the BBC's management it would become the management," Mr Davies said.

Would Dr Kelly still be alive if the governors had sued for peace?

It is an important point in the context not only of the Hutton inquiry but also in the context of the wider debate about the BBC's future.

There have been calls for the BBC to be regulated by the new body, Ofcom, because the governors are said to be too close to the management to act as effective regulators.

Mr Sumption failed to land many telling blows. But as so often during this inquiry the contributions of Lord Hutton himself and the inquiry's own counsel, James Dingemans QC, were acute.

Lord Hutton came back to a point that he has raised with virtually every BBC witness: the difference between the BBC reporting something as fact and the BBC reporting a source as saying something.

The governors, said Mr Davies, had been perfectly cool-headed, but you couldn't help feeling the question may foreshadow at least one of Lord Hutton's conclusions

For the first time a BBC witness responded by pointing out that the terms in which Andrew Gilligan's story was reported in the 6 o'clock news on Radio 4 were different from those the reporter had used in his contentious live two-way at 6.07 am.

In the latter he said the 45 minute claim had been inserted into the dossier even though the government "probably knew it was wrong".

On this last day of evidence at the inquiry Mr Dingemans produced a new document - a draft cue for Andrew Gilligan's story on the Today programme, which said that "experts felt their work was being misrepresented to justify an attack on Iraq to fit in with the US-led timetable for overthrowing Saddam Hussein".

As Mr Dingemans pointed out, that would have been correct. But it was not what Andrew Gilligan actually said.

And in one of his last questions he suggested this was a case in which both sides, the BBC and government, put common sense and perspective to one side while they engaged in their dispute.

The governors, said Mr Davies, had been perfectly cool-headed, but you couldn't help feeling the question may foreshadow at least one of Lord Hutton's conclusions.