The David Kelly saga caught up with British Prime Minister again with Blair forced to fend off questions about how he felt when he heard of the arms expert's apparent suicide.
Blair was in a question and answer session Tuesday with students at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University when a young female student appeared to catch him off guard.
She asked how Blair felt when he learned that Kelly had died and how he thought he would get through the crisis and regain the British public's trust.
"This is a desperately sad time for the family of Dr. Kelly and his funeral's not been held yet, and I don't want to say more about this situation except to say there will be a proper independent inquiry into what happened," AFP cited Blair as saying.
On Monday, he promised to "cooperate fully" with a judicial investigation into the suicide of the former UN arms inspector at the center of allegations that Downing Street exaggerated the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Asked if he would give evidence in public to Lord Hutton, the judge conducting the inquiry, Blair replied, "That's up to him."
In the meantime, compounding Blair's troubles, an ICM survey carried out following Kelly's death revealed that 54 percent of British voters are unhappy with his performance as Prime Minister.
The survey, published Tuesday in The Guardian found just 37 percent of respondents to be happy with Blair, giving the Prime Minister an overall approval rating of minus 17 points.
Meanwhile, in a Mori poll published Tuesday in The Sun, a quarter of voters who backed Labour at the last election in 2001 said they had since switched to a rival party while a YouGov survey released Monday showed 39 percent feel Blair should resign over the Kelly affair.
Also on Tuesday, Blair said he had no regrets over the war on Iraq.
Despite the political crisis sparked by Kelly's death, the Prime Minister told the Chinese students he did not regret taking action against Iraq.
"No, I don't regret it. I've no doubt at all that Iraq was trying to develop these weapons. I believe, however difficult it was, that it was the right thing to do," Blair told a student questioner at the University, according to Reuters.
Blair said that the Iraq survey group had only just begun to do their work, and when they came to make their report, "people will see what the truth is." (Albawaba.com)
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
