If Mr Hoon resigns, as he must, how can Mr Blair not resign as well?

Three events counted at Westminster this week. The first, and by far the most important, was the dramatic testimony given on Monday to Lord Hutton by Kevin Tebbit, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence. Tebbit confirmed that Tony Blair chaired the crucial meeting at which the ‘naming strategy’, designed to bring the identity of Dr Kelly into the public domain, was agreed.

The importance of Tebbit’s revelation could not be greater. If Tebbit’s evidence is to be accepted, then Tony Blair’s emphatic assertion that ‘I did not authorise the leaking of the name of Dr Kelly’ was false. It shows up the Downing Street claim that the MoD was the ‘lead department’ on the Kelly business as a grotesque fiction — there was not even an MoD representative at the meeting when the naming strategy was agreed.

However hard he tries, Lord Hutton will now find it impossible to keep some powerful criticisms of No. 10 Downing Street out of his report. And that blows sky-high the carefully constructed No. 10 strategy to make Geoff Hoon, the woeful Secretary of State for Defence, scapegoat for the Kelly affair. If Hoon resigns, as he surely must, people will find it hard to understand why Tony Blair, the architect of the naming strategy, does not resign as well.

It is easy to see why publication of the Hutton report has been put back, possibly to January. Lord Hutton needs time to balance his duty to stay loyal to the truth against the natural and proper reluctance any law lord must feel about inflicting massive and potentially lethal damage upon a sitting prime minister.

The second event, in some respects closer to farce than tragedy, was the announcement from Sir Philip Mawer, Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, that he will investigate claims that Iain Duncan Smith paid his wife Betsy public money for carrying out a non-existent job.