Former BBC chief Greg Dyke has reopened the row over Tony Blair's decision to go to war with Iraq.

In memoirs serialised in two Sunday newspapers, the former director general of the corporation said the prime minister had "duped" the country over the case for the conflict

Dyke was forced to resign from his post, along with former BBC chairman Gavyn Davies, last January after Lord Hutton delivered a scathing attack on a controversial Radio 4 report that accused the government of "sexing up" the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.

Today programme reporter Andrew Gilligan had accused ministers of "probably" knowing they were publishing false claims that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

As the decision to go to war continued to cause controversy for the prime minister, Number 10 sought to downplay the latest criticisms.

"Mr Dyke is entitled to his opinion. It is not one we share nor is it shared by the four exhaustive inquiries that have looked into this matter," said a Downing Street spokesman.

In his book, Dyke claimed the prime minister had misled the public about the reasons behind the war.

"The charge against Blair is damning. He was either incompetent and took Britain to war on a misunderstanding or he lied when he told the the House of Commons he didn't know what the 45 minute claim meant," he said.

"We were duped. History will not be on Blair's side, it will show that the whole saga is a great political scandal."

WMD row

He added that the row between ministers and the BBC over Gilligan's reporting of the Iraq dossier grew because former Number 10 communications director Alastair Campbell was "out of control".

Dyke also said that Gilligan's original report was "largely right".

The governors who forced him to tender his resignation in the wake of the Hutton report should now resign themselves, Dyke added.

It was also claimed that John Scarlett, the former chairman of the joint intelligence committee who has since been appointed head of MI6, had expressed doubts about the intelligence dossier.

"At the BBC, we knew he was uncomfortable with the public case being made for the war because that is what he had told one journalist on a bench in the grounds of Ditchley Park, the exclusive Oxfordshire house used as a centre for high level discussions on international affairs," Dyke wrote.

"Scarlett told the journalist he was particularly worried about how the dossier had been interpreted in the press."