There was no "underhand" strategy for naming Dr David Kelly but the Ministry of Defence could have offered him more support, Lord Hutton has concluded.

The report found that the MoD "was at fault and is to be criticised for not informing Dr Kelly that its press office would confirm his name if a journalist suggested it".

"Although I am satisfied that Dr Kelly realised, once the MoD statement had been issued on Tuesday 8 July, that his name would come out, it must have been a great shock and very upsetting for him to have been told in a brief telephone call from his line manager, Dr Wells, on the evening of 9 July that the press office of his own department had confirmed his name to the press and must have given rise to a feeling that he had been badly let down by his employer," said the law lord's report.

And Lord Hutton also concluded that the Whitehall ministry should have had a procedure in place for informing Dr Kelly when his name had been confirmed.

But Lord Hutton said that Dr Kelly's exposure to the press was "only one of the factors placing him under great stress" and that individual MoD officials had tried to help the scientist.

And the report added that "because of his intensely private nature, Dr Kelly was not an easy man to help or to whom to give advice".

The law lord accepted that by looking at some of the witness statements in isolation it was possible to infer that that an underhand strategy to name Dr Kelly did exist.

But the wider picture was that the government was increasingly concerned that it would have been accused of a cover-up if it had not been revealed that Dr Kelly had come forward, and that his name would inevitably become known.

"There was no dishonourable or underhand or duplicitous strategy by the government covertly to leak Dr Kelly's name to the media," said the report.

In addition, the law lord insisted that evidence given by Tony Blair and MoD permanent secretary Sir Kevin Tebbit were not in conflict.

Both confirmed the prime minister's involvement in the meeting at which the decision was made to release the statement confirming Dr Kelly's admission that he had spoken to Andrew Gilligan.

Tebbit confirmed this during cross-examination at his second appearance before the inquiry, said Hutton, and "there was nothing new or dramatic in that evidence".