The prime minister has this weekend come under renewed pressure to provide a full explanation about his knowledge of Saddam Hussein's military capability prior to the Iraq war.

Downing Street maintains that Tony Blair became aware after the conflict that the widely reported 45-minute weapons claim had only applied to battlefield munitions.

Whilst the defence secretary and senior intelligence chiefs are understood to have been aware of the exact Iraqi capability, Number 10 insists this information did not filter through to the prime minister.

At the time, however, media reports suggested that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction against Britons based in Cyprus within the 45-minute timeframe.

These reports were not challenged by either Downing Street or the Ministry of Defence.

Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy repeated his demand for clarification on the issue.

"I think the prime minister himself has got to come back to the House of Commons and make a statement clarifying once and for all exactly who knew what, on what basis and at what time," he said

"I think the important thing now is that we do resolve the political judgments that were made at the time.

"There must be a clear distinction between the evaluation of the intelligence and the policy arrived at by the government of the day and there appears to have been a conflation of the two in this circumstance."

His demand was backed by former health secretary Frank Dobson who called on Blair to make a full statement to the Commons.

"I do think we need some clarification now, if only for the sake of the Labour Party, of what the prime minister did or didn't know and why the decisions were reached," he told GMTV.

"Otherwise all we'll get is newspaper after newspaper coming up with  titbits of stuff that may be true or may be invented and it will be immensely damaging to the government and damaging to the country.

"We need an authoritative, on-the-record statement of exactly what they  knew."