John Morrison lost his job as chief investigator for Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), the parliament's intelligence watchdog, after criticising Blair in a television interview, the newspaper said.

A senior British government official told the Sunday Times last week that Morrison had been "chopped" for speaking out on television.

"He is certainly not going to work for that committee again," said the unnamed source.

In an interview two weeks ago on BBC's investigative Panorama programme Morrison told how intelligence officials had reacted in disbelief to Blair's claim that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had posed "a serious and current threat to the United Kingdom."

"When I heard him using those words I could almost hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall (government)," Morrison said in the interview, according to the Sunday Times.

Blair had argued that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction made the Iraqi leader an immediate threat and that he had to be removed, but no such weapons have been found in the 15 months since Baghdad fell.

Earlier this month an official report into pre-war intelligence on Iraq's WMDs concluded that Britain's spy agencies got their facts badly wrong over the danger posed by Saddam.

However the inquiry, led by former top civil servant Lord Robin Butler, characterised any failings as institutional and absolved Blair and his government from deliberate wrongdoing.

WAR.WIRE